Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside whatever replaces your smartphone – announces two new products

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 the next major computing platform won't be a phone.

To power that vision, Qualcomm is announcing two new offerings: Snapdragon Reality Elite, a platform for mixed-reality glasses designed to run more powerful on-device AI, and the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START), a combination of hardware modules and a software stack for AI devices, starting with smart glasses.

Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers up to 60% GPU, 30% CPU, and 160% NPU performance improvements over its previous XR platform, according to the company. Qualcomm says the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second and supports 4.4K per-eye resolution at 90 fps, along with better head and hand tracking and see-through capabilities. It is designed for two types of devices: stand-alone video-see-through (VST) headsets and lightweight, tethered optical-see-through (OST) glasses. First devices include XREAL Project Aura and an upcoming device from Play for Dream.

START consists of an AR chip, a software platform, companion apps, and a white-label program 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 are among the first partners. Qualcomm said START will expand to other form factors in the future.

Amon argued that as companies seek more real-world data to power AI agents, a wave of new hardware startups and form factors will emerge, with implications for established smartphone players like Apple and Samsung. He noted over 40 designs in development. Qualcomm is positioning itself as the foundational silicon for whatever comes after the smartphone.