Qualcomm Brings AI to the Auto Market

While smart glasses and other wearables have been getting a great deal of attention lately, the market that’s poised to be the biggest and most impactful new category of personal devices is cars. With the move to software-defined vehicles (SDVs) along with continuing advances in assisted and autonomous driving, it’s the automotive market that’s on the brink of being the “next big thing” for the tech industry.

Not surprisingly, then, just as AI has become the predominant factor in advancing other device categories, the technology is starting to make a bigger impact in the car market as well. The latest example comes from Qualcomm, which unveiled next generation AI-powered versions of some automotive-focused chips at its recent Snapdragon Summit event in Maui. The Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite are targeted for infotainment and assisted/autonomous driving features in the premium car market and are expected to start sampling in 2025.

Both chips and their respective software platforms are parts of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Digital Chassis that first debuted in 2022. Building on the company’s previous automotive efforts as well as its latest core semiconductor IP, the two new chips feature the Oryon CPU architecture. Oryon is a major step forward in both performance and power efficiency versus previous Qualcomm CPUs. It’s also a big part of the Snapdragon X Elite line of chips for the PC market that was released earlier this year. (A second-generation version of Oryon is part of the new Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile CPU for smartphones also announced this year in Maui.)

In terms of raw performance, the enhancements versus previous generations are quite large. Both Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite feature a 3X increase in CPU performance, a 3X increase in the Adreno GPU performance and a whopping 12x improvement in the company’s Hexagon NPU performance versus the company’s previous automotive-focused parts. The net result is a set of car-focused chips that can enable significantly more AI capabilities within the vehicle, both for information and entertainment, as well as assisted driving capabilities.

From a cockpit experience perspective, this translates into having the potential to build significantly better voice-based personal assistants, allowing more intuitive interactions with the vehicle and its features. The increased processing of all three compute elements (CPU, GPU and NPU) allows cars with these chips to run larger and more capable large language models (LLMs), which in turn can not only enable a voice-based interface, but the possibility of running intelligent agents that can help with everything from learning your driving and music preferences to automatically moving a dinner reservation if you’re stuck in traffic.

In addition, the Cockpit Elite can support up to 16 high-resolution displays throughout the car, providing an enormous range of entertainment and information options and separate audio feeds for different passengers or different zones in the car.

From a driving perspective, the new Ride Elite supports more than 40 multimodal sensors, including 20 high-resolution cameras, as well as lidar and other sensors to help enable safer driving either when a driver is in charge or for assisted or semi-autonomous features. Again, the increased processing power of the new chip allows the car to run more sophisticated AI models, which should lead to better and more reliable autonomous driving capabilities. To Qualcomm’s credit, they don’t try to claim full autonomy—a mistake that many in the automotive industry made well before the capability is available—but instead focus on making the experience of human-monitored driving as good as it can be.

Speaking of safety, as with previous Snapdragon Digital Chassis components, the new Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite support the critical functional safety standards, including ASIL-D and ISO 26262, both of which are essential for ensuring safe operation of a software-defined vehicle in case of a failed digital component or software crash.

The obvious benefits of getting these chips built into future cars will be a driving experience that extends the AI-powered computing capabilities we’re now accustomed to with our PCs and smartphones into our vehicles. But above and beyond that, what’s interesting about this announcement is that it shows how Qualcomm is continuing on its path to diversification of its product line and company revenues. While the company has been providing communications and telematics solutions to carmakers for over 20 years, their entry into automotive computing is much more recent. The nature of the automotive market is that it has typically taken about three years between when a chip or other critical component for a car is introduced and when it shows up in vehicles on the road (although Qualcomm said it expects cars with these new chips to be available in 2026 thanks to all the previous legwork done with its Snapdragon Digital Chassis platform).

As a result, Qualcomm’s earlier efforts and these new enhancements will only begin to make an impact on the company’s business results starting next year. Given the company’s high-level partnership announcements with BMW, GM and Rivian that they also made at this event, however, the future opportunities for revenue diversification and growth in the auto market are looking strong.

From a product and technology perspective, the announcement is important because it shows how the company’s big investment in the Oryon CPU technology a few years back is now being leveraged across multiple areas. From PCs to smartphones to cars and likely other devices in the future, Qualcomm is clearly working to leverage its IP in the most efficient way possible. Along the same lines, by integrating a similar NPU architecture across all these device categories and building its cloud-based Qualcomm AI Hub software portal to encourage developers to build AI-powered apps using that consistent architecture, the company is opening intriguing opportunities to bring AI-powered capabilities to a range of different devices. Imagine, for example, computer vision models originally built for smartphones ending up being used for automotive sensing applications. It’s an interesting thought.

All told, these announcements start to paint a more comprehensive picture of what Qualcomm’s strategy is and how AI is now weaving a link throughout most of its efforts. Given the immense hype around generative AI, one could argue that the company is simply being opportunistic but based on the comprehensive perspective they presented on the topic, it’s clear they’re building for a future that they see as being very real very soon.

Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech.