Qualcomm Expands Line of SOCs

November 7, 2024

Sebastian Blanco

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. president and CEO Cristiano Amon is not humble. While announcing updates to the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite platforms during the 2024 Snapdragon Summier in Hawaii in October, Amon said Qualcomm partners with virtually every single car company on “completely [changing] the vehicle experience.” These new elite-tier platforms, which will be available for sampling in 2025, are the latest addition to the Snapdragon Digital Chassis portfolio, and Amon said they represent just the next big step for tomorrow’s vehicles.

“In all humility, we say that Snapdragon Digital Chassis became a key asset of the industry,” he said. “Not a Qualcomm asset, an asset of the industry. It’s about not only what Qualcomm can do with Snapdragon, but how we actually enable innovation from our partners.”

As their names imply, Cockpit Elite powers a vehicle’s in-cabin “digital experiences” (like dashboard and infotainment displays), while Ride Elite is used for automated driving capabilities. They can be used together on the Snapdragon Digital Chassis to provide both functionalities on one system-on-a-chip (SOC). The new elite-tier SOC now use an automotive-specific version of the Oryon CPU that’s Qualcomm’s fastest, with up to three times the processing power of previous generations.

Another upgrade to the new Elite chips is a better, dedicated Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) designed for multimodal AI. Qualcomm is targeting 12-fold performance improvement for this dedicated AI engine over its previous flagship cockpit SOC. There’s also an updated Adreno GPU with support for real-time ray tracing and better rendering capabilities that will allow new infotainment possibilities and dynamic driver information, including immersive 3D experiences. The GPU can power up to 16 high-resolution displays concurrently, including the cluster, infotainment screens, passenger screens, digital mirrors and more. A new camera subsystem image signal processor (ISP) can handle over 40 multimodal sensors, including up to 20 high-resolution cameras for 360-degree coverage and in-cabin monitoring.

One feature Snapdragon Elite chips will provide is more personalized in-cabin experiences. The new camera ISP, for example, was designed to provide visual context to power AI applications like zonal audio processing for different seats in the vehicle.

“By localizing the passenger in the vehicle and understanding their needs based on where they’re seated, the driver will get alerts about road and environment without disturbing the passengers immersed in a movie or a gaming experience,” said Qualcomm automotive product manager Mark Granger. “Imagine if a passenger happens to say, I’m cold, and the system increases the temperature only in their zone. This device is remarkably powerful.

The new chips also meet automotive safety standards for ASIL-D systems and have a dedicated safety island controller and hardware architecture so that ADAS functions operate in isolation and without interference, Qualcomm said. Granger said the new SOCs were also designed to support a more consolidated vehicle architecture that enables more effective and efficient cross-domain data sharing within the vehicle.

“The customized Qualcomm Oryon CPU is designed with a flexible architecture that can host multiple virtualized environments to support a variety of applications concurrently,” he said. “This is central to developing software-defined experiences in the vehicle.”

Qualcomm’s busy OEM partners

There are already hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road today powered by previous versions of the Snapdragon Digital Chassis. Some of Qualcomm’s automotive partners include General Motors, Rivian, Volvo, Ford and Sony-Honda Mobility. All these OEMs use Snapdragon Automotive platforms with Epic Games ’Unreal engine for their human-machine interfaces, said Tim Sweeney, Epic Games founder and CEO.

“Their artists can create driving interfaces at unprecedented speed using collaborative workflows and seeing near-final results in real time,” he said via a video appearance at the summit. “Real-time visualization software is perfect for showing the results of NPU-driven AI experiences, whether they’re for driver recognition, driving assistance or other advanced features.”

The new Elite chips are Qualcomm’s answer to the automotive industry’s push for more centralized computing, software-defined vehicles and AI-driven architectures. Another partner, BMW, is using the Snapdragon Digital Chassis for compute in the upcoming Neue Klasse, which will launch in 2025 with a central compute unit that processes all sensor data, said BMW chief technical officer Frank Weber. BMW and Qualcomm are co-developing the new software set for the Snapdragon Ride platform.

Mercedes-Benz worked with Qualcomm to develop its own vehicle operating system, MB.OS that powers the automaker’s MBUX Virtual Assistant. MB.OS was first shown on the Concept CLA Class at CES 2024. Magnus Östberg, Mercedes-Benz ’chief software officer, said Qualcomm’s new SOCs mean the automaker can rethink a vehicle’s digital infrastructure.

“This proprietary shift to cloud architecture represents a completely new approach for us,” he said. “It connects all domains in the car with our Mercedes Benz intelligent hub. It is the brain inside the vehicle, and it will be central to every future product, starting with the forthcoming series of the new Mercedes Benz CLA, set to launch next year.”

Östberg said MB.OS was developed in-house so the automaker could retain control over things like the customer relationship, data privacy and overall feature integration.

“The core of MB.OS is decoupling hardware from software, to make the process of delivering new features faster and more adaptable,” he said. “One fundamental principle is that we no longer buy hardware and software as a single unit. Of course, we don’t develop everything ourselves. We standardize the hardware and software components and build on industry standards, where we either purchase software or components or we use, for example, open-source solutions. We integrate that together, and this gives a customer experience that is software-driven, and it’s seamless, just like they are used to in the digital ecosystem today.”

Östberg said the third-generation MB.UX infotainment system in the new Mercedes-Benz E class runs on a Snapdragon digital chassis and is a precursor to what MB.OS will be able to deliver in 2025. MB.UX 3 integrates five components that were previously in different parts of the car into a single computer, the Snapdragon Digital Chassis. With CPU power increased by 72% and GPU performance up by 91%, Mercedes now better understands what MB is.OS will be able to deliver.

“MB.OS will turn every Mercedes-Benz into a mobile office and an entertainment center,” Östberg said. “It will provide entertainment apps like Apple, Amazon Music, Spotify, RideView and YouTube, and also productivity-based apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Bookings.com. Our team is constantly delivering new apps and watching for new customer demands. In our new E-Class, we already have the precursor to our MB.OS on the road.”

Putting it all together

Using less energy while delivering more power for connected features is simply what it takes to build tomorrow’s vehicles, said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm group manager of automotive, industrial, and cloud.

“The modern car is equipped with multiple sensors, including cameras, radars and lidars to detect everything that’s happening around them,” he said. “Processing the massive amounts of data coming in through these sensors and applying context creates a tremendous opportunity to map the real world in the digital world. It provides actionable information that can be used to inform a variety of applications, such as 3D mapping for premium navigation or safety alerts. Modeling the vehicle’s environment in real-time is a feat in and of itself.”

Qualcomm claims its new edge intelligence will allow AI to map point cloud data in real-time as it creates an environmental model for the car. Before executing a lane change, for example, an automated driver assistance system needs to know the distance to nearby vehicles as well as how fast they’re going, and then calculate their independent future trajectory.

“You almost have to be able to predict the future,” Duggal said. “To make these predictions and plan its route, the vehicle fuses data from cameras, radars, lidars and location services so your car can detect your environment and create a model of the world, where you [can] manage hazards, avoid them, know where the safe spaces are, and overlay them with rules, learning, decision making and actuation. This is how a car operates autonomously.”

It was interesting that this year’s Snapdragon summit took place around the same time that Linux inventor Linus Torvalds said he believes AI will change the world, but that it is “currently 90% marketing and 10% reality.” Qualcomm’s overly bullish message was that AI’s impact will be entirely positive. When it comes to the huge potential problem of AI-generated hallucinations in automated driving, Qualcomm’s Duggal deflected and said it will be up to the OEMs how to handle final security issues.

“There are always outer rules that are going to take over once the AI has provided input in terms of what the action is that needs to be done, and those rules are controlled and managed by the automaker,” he said. “That is how all of these systems are built. Now, these rules are also getting more and more complex because the more level of automation you have, the more complex it is for the rules to be defined, but if you look at standard systems like L2+ systems that are mandated by DOT in terms of what the car is allowed to do, these are very prescribed functions.”

Which brings us back to not-humble Qualcomm CEO Amon. 2024 was the first time Qualcomm dedicated an entire day to automotive technology at its Snapdragon Summit, now in its ninth year. His company put on an unquestionably positive vision for what its new Elite chips offer the auto industry in everyhing from in-car gaming to autonomous driving. Of course, what will eventually matter is not the processor speeds or Snapgragon breakthroughs but what automakers do with all that power. Here, too, Amon is confident.

“The experiences are going to be so good, you might not want to leave your car,” he said.

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