Qualcomm has a couple of new chips. The Snapdragon Wear 2500 SoC is for wearables with 4G LTE that is said to be optimised for smartwatches for children and will allow a special version of Android, called ‘Android for Kids to run in 512MB. The chip is said to support a five megapixel camera as well as NFC payment and, of course, location tracking. Huawei is reported to be the lead customer.
GSMArena has an interesting article that pulls together some information on a new chip that is called the Snapdragon 1000 that is for AR and VR as well as PCs. Microsoft has been advertising for engineers to work on support for the chip which will go beyond the Snapdragon 850 that was announced at Computex. (Qualcomm Adds Another Option for Windows)
At AWE, Qualcomm announced the XR1 platform for AR with AI and is already being worked on by Mega, HTC Vive, Vuzix and Picoare (at least, that’s the name that Qualcomm gave, although we weren’t able to dig out the company at press time!). The platform supports a range of audio technologies as well and supports UltraHD at 60fps. An Image processor is claimed to reduce noise on still photos. The platform supports 3 and 6 degrees of freedom technology. Latency from the integrated sensor hub and optimized sensor fusion abilities is claimed to keep latency below 20ms.
