Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside whatever replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products toward that end

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on over 40 different AI wearable devices — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches — a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next major computing platform won't be a phone. Compared to its previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers improvements of up to 60% in GPU performance, up to 30% in CPU performance, and up to 160% in NPU performance, according to the company.

The short version

• Percentage gains in chip specs can be hard to contextualize, but Qualcomm offers one concrete data point, saying the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for quick, responsive AI interactions.
• Qualcomm says the chip will also enable better head and hand tracking, along with improved see-through capabilities.
• Among the first devices to use it: XREAL Project Aura, shown at Google I/O earlier this year, and an upcoming device from Play for Dream.
• START, meanwhile, consists of an AR chip, a software platform, companion apps, and a white-label program aimed at helping hardware makers get to market faster.

What the source reports

Through the white label program, the company is offering three reference designs: an audio + camera setup similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, a monocular display, and a binocular display. Eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and O’Neill — owned by TitanFlex — will be among the first partners in the white label program. Qualcomm said START will expand beyond smart glasses to support other form factors in the future.

Why it matters

Amon’s comments, made to CNBC , flesh out the strategic logic behind both announcements.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at TechCrunch via the links above and below.