Mobile computing and wireless connection technology are bringing more possibilities to mobile phones, cars, XR and other terminals, enabling consumers to realize seamless intelligent experience in multiple living spaces, even in the switching between real and virtual worlds. On the night of Xiaolong on May 20, Qualcomm released Xiaolong 8 + mobile platform for the next generation of flagship mobile phones, and announced the latest progress in the fields of automobile and XR.
six technical matrices support mobile platform upgrade
When purchasing 5g flagship mobile phones, power consumption performance has increasingly become a key factor for consumers to consider. Because 5g base has higher peak power than 4G, it has higher requirements for mobile phone power optimization. At the same time, high-quality and heavy-duty mobile games have increasingly become the pursuit of mobile game players and game developers. The number of apps that can be opened at the same time in the background has become the focus of mobile phone manufacturers' competition, and the test of mobile phone power consumption performance is more severe.
Energy efficiency performance is the main highlight of Xiaolong 8 + flagship mobile chip. On the basis of improving CPU performance and GPU frequency by 10% respectively, Xiaolong 8 + has reduced Adreno GPU power consumption by 30% and CPU power consumption by 30%. From the perspective of the whole SOC, the overall power consumption of Xiaolong 8 + is reduced by 15%. Taking Yuanshen, which is often tested by major mobile phone manufacturers, as an example, running Yuanshen with 810p image quality for 60 minutes at 25 ° C room temperature, the average frame rate of Xiaolong 8 + reached 60.2fps, and the power consumption was reduced by 30% compared with the previous generation.
"It's not a half generation small upgrade like the previous Xiaolong 888 +, but a real experience innovation. Xiaomi and Qualcomm have been jointly commissioned for several months. From the measured data I've got so far, it has a beautiful power consumption performance." Wang Xiang, partner and President of Xiaomi group, said in his speech.
Xiaolong 8 + also brings together the latest technology development points of Qualcomm. According to Hou Mingjuan, global vice president of Qualcomm, Qualcomm focuses on six technical fields of mobile experience: connectivity, AI, security, video, game and audio. Taking this as the blueprint, Qualcomm has launched snapdragon connect, snapdragon smart, snapdragon secure, snapdragon sight, snapdragon elite game and snapdragon sound technology matrix respectively. On Xiaolong 8 + platform, these capabilities integrate image features such as 8K HDR video recording, hdr10 + format shooting, more than 1 billion color capture, and extend the talk time between users and their relatives and friends for more than 5.5 hours, supporting CD quality, lossless sound quality and other experiences. It can be said that these six capabilities are Qualcomm's ability to upgrade the coordinate system of the mobile platform.
It is reported that the commercial terminals equipped with Xiaolong 8 + are expected to be available in the third quarter of 2022, and manufacturers such as ASUS Rog, black shark, glory, iqoo, Lenovo, Motorola, Nubia, Yijia, oppo, osom, realm, red devils, redmi, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE will take the lead in carrying them.
automotive chip manufacturing process equals flagship mobile phone
Driven by the trend of intellectualization, networking and electronization, cars are not only travel tools, but also intelligent terminals on wheels and people's "third living space".
Gu Weihao, co-founder and CEO of FeMo Zhixing, said that due to the enabling role of artificial intelligence, the past decade has been the fastest developing stage in the history of automatic driving. In 2012, deep learning made great achievements in image recognition and speech recognition, and the accuracy of recognition was greatly improved. The elements of automatic driving, such as chip computing power, algorithm model, camera hardware and data, have developed rapidly. First, the computing power of the chip on the terminal has grown from less than 0.5tops in 2012 to hundreds of tops, which has increased hundreds of times; The in-depth learning model developed from 1 million parameters in 2012 to a wide range, making transformer's model parameters reach 170 billion, an increase of nearly 10000 times; The number of cameras that autopilot perception relies on has grown from one with hundreds of thousands of pixels in 2012 to 12 with 8 million pixels today, and the amount of perceived data has increased hundreds of times.
Intelligent networked vehicle technologies such as automatic driving and intelligent cockpit also drive the vehicle's electronic and electrical architecture from distributed to domain controller. Its advantage is that the vehicle can obtain the latest functions through OTA upgrade. Based on the scalable software and hardware collaborative design architecture and the functional upgrading requirements of the car in the life cycle, Qualcomm launched Xiaolong digital chassis including autopilot, cockpit, Zhilian and car to cloud services. In 2021, Qualcomm launched the 4th generation Xiaolong automobile digital cockpit platform and equipped with intelligent cockpit chip with 5nm process, realizing the synchronization of automobile chip and flagship mobile phone chip for the first time.
Hou Mingjuan said that this year is the first year of Xiaolong intelligent driving technology. He Xiaopeng, chairman and CEO of Xiaopeng automobile, said in his speech that as of the first quarter of 2022, the cumulative sales of Xiaopeng automobile with Xiaolong digital chassis had exceeded 150000 units. Xiaopeng G9 equipped with Xiaolong cockpit platform will be launched soon, which will bring more 3D, immersive and intelligent driving and riding experience.
key to the meta universe
VR, AR and other XR terminals are the entrance for users to connect to the metauniverse. In this Xiaolong night, Qualcomm launched the reference design of wireless ar smart glasses, removing the connection line previously used to connect mobile phones and AR glasses to realize the wireless XR experience. This wireless ar reference design is equipped with the XR special chip Xiaolong XR2 platform, which is 40% smaller than the previous generation in appearance and achieves a more balanced weight distribution in ergonomics, making it possible to wear for a longer time.
In 2018, Qualcomm and nreal jointly launched the concept of "simple ar glasses". Simple ar glasses do not have processing capacity and need to be connected to smart phones or special processing units. Since then, Qualcomm has launched a wired smart glasses reference design on how to provide richer experiences and features without replacing mobile phones. "After that, we received feedback from customers, hoping to remove the connecting cable. Therefore, today we launched the reference design of wireless ar smart glasses equipped with Xiaolong XR2 platform." Hugo swart, vice president of Qualcomm technologies and general manager of XR business, said.
The key of wireless AR is the separate processing of smart phone and AR smart glasses. Its principle is that AR smart glasses can realize the functions of six degrees of freedom, handle, eye and gesture tracking, and can transmit the corresponding data to smart phones wirelessly. The XR application running on the mobile phone can use the information transmitted by the glasses end for graphics rendering, and return the encoded data to the glasses end wirelessly. Ar smart glasses will decode the data stream and process and display the data at the glasses end, so as to provide rich experience for users.
Hugo swart said that in the future, VR / AR terminals will evolve along two parallel paths. The first development path is VR / AR all-in-one machine, that is, VR / AR head display. The second development path is smaller and more compact ar glasses, which can be connected with PC, smartphone and other computing units wirelessly. Based on the reference design of wireless ar smart glasses, Qualcomm will promote ar smart glasses to realize real wireless connection, become lighter and more comfortable to wear.
