Unsurprisingly, just as AI has been instrumental in advancing other device categories, it’s now beginning to make a significant impact in the car market.
Why it matters: While smart glasses and other wearables have been getting a great deal of attention lately, the market poised to be the largest and most impactful new category of personal devices is cars. With the shift to software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and ongoing advances in assisted and autonomous driving, the automotive industry is on the verge of becoming the „next big thing“ for the tech sector.
Unsurprisingly, just as AI has been instrumental in advancing other device categories, it’s now beginning to make a significant impact in the car market.
The latest example comes from Qualcomm, which recently unveiled next-gen versions of its automotive-focused chips at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui. The Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite are designed for infotainment and assisted/autonomous driving features in premium vehicles and are expected to start sampling in 2025.
Both chips and their respective software platforms are part of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Digital Chassis, which debuted in 2022. Building on the company’s previous automotive efforts, these new chips feature the Oryon CPU architecture.
Oryon represents a major leap in performance and power efficiency compared to previous Qualcomm CPUs. It’s also a key component of the Snapdragon X Elite chips for PCs, released earlier this year. A second-generation version of Oryon is also part of the new Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile CPU for smartphones.
In terms of raw performance, the improvements over previous generations are substantial. Both the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite offer a 3x increase in CPU performance, a 3x increase in Adreno GPU performance, and a remarkable 12x boost in the performance of Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU compared to its earlier automotive chips.
The result is a set of car-focused processors that can enable significantly more AI capabilities within vehicles, enhancing both infotainment and assisted driving features.
From a cockpit experience perspective, this performance boost means the potential to build much more advanced voice-based personal assistants, allowing for more intuitive interactions with the vehicle and its features.
