Qualcomm against the rest of the world, that could be the headline perfectly, because silently and without big presentations or dramas the company is putting Intel, NVIDIA and AMD in check. One of the main markets that we are going to have in 2022 and the following years is the automotive one, where brands are in need as never before of processors, SoCs and technology belonging to the world of the PC and server. Snapdragon ride It is Qualcomm’s bet for IA and BMW has already done with its services.
Today and in the immediate future everything happens through Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, the example we saw a few days ago with NVIDIA Omniverse makes it very clear where the market and its industries are going. If you want to stay at the top you have to innovate and just like Intel has done with its heterogeneous Alder Lake architecture, car manufacturers are transitioning to the most innovative technology and that implies the best possible chips.
Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride: automated driving and assistance
It is not the first interaction between Qualcomm and BMW as such, but it is the beginning of a much more solid path towards what we all see: technologically cutting-edge cars and the latest. In many brands, Americans have their hands on different technologies, such as information or infotainment, but given the relevant steps seen in the market (NVIDIA is an example again) they incite us to think that what is seen in the new prototypes of multiple manufacturers is an understatement.
What is the novelty then? The announcement between Qualcomm and BMW to use the Snapdragon Ride platform and chips. This will not affect the new BMW iX as such, but it will affect the models that arrive at the end of next year. Why more than a year of GAP? Basically because the Qualcomm platform will arrive by mid-2022 in few units and it will be by the end when it is deployed in greater volume.
Leaders in ADAS and AD?
That Qualcomm wants to compete with NVIDIA and soon with AMD in Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems and Automated Driving is not news in itself. Snapdragon Ride is focused on that and much more with AI in between. The main SoC has front, rear and surround camera recognition capabilities, as well as full control over driving assistance, although the problem is that leaked information about them today is sparse.
At the moment there are no models as such or versions, but we do know that the performance will be very high, specifically it will reach more than 10 TOPS with less than 5 watts of consumption in a supposed ADAS-10 SoC. Hence, which would be the most basic model, we would go to the top of the range with 720 TOPS and 130 watts that would encompass two ADAS-60 chips, where the cooling requirements should already be active.
There is currently no specific information about the ARM versions of the chips or the GPUs that they will implement, but according to rumors Qualcomm could change the nomenclatures on all its chips to launch a new era that will logically include the automotive industry.
