Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside whatever replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products toward that end
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- Qualcomm is developing more than 40 AI wearable designs — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches — CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC, framing the post-smartphone era as inevitable.
- Snapdragon Reality Elite, Qualcomm's new mixed-reality platform, delivers up to 60% better GPU, 30% better CPU, and 160% better NPU performance versus its prior XR chip, and can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second.
- The platform supports 4.4K per-eye resolution at 90 fps and targets both standalone video-see-through headsets and tethered optical-see-through glasses, with XREAL's Project Aura (shown at Google I/O) and an upcoming Play for Dream device among the first adopters.
- START (Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit) bundles an AR chip, software stack, companion apps, and a white-label program offering three reference designs — an audio-plus-camera setup similar to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, a monocular display, and a binocular display.
- Eyewear makers Inspecs and O'Neill (owned by TitanFlex) are the first white-label partners, with Qualcomm saying START will expand to form factors beyond smart glasses.
- Amon argued the new wave of always-on, context-gathering wearable hardware carries "major implications for established smartphone players like Apple and Samsung" — a direct shot at the incumbents Qualcomm has long supplied.
Why it matters: Qualcomm is repositioning from a smartphone-chip supplier to the foundational silicon layer for whatever device form factor replaces the phone, using a white-label program to lower the barrier for hardware startups entering a market Meta already dominates with Ray-Ban. With 40+ designs in its pipeline and named eyewear partners Inspecs and O'Neill, Qualcomm is explicitly trying to make its XR/wearable chips the default — a move that directly threatens Apple and Samsung's grip on the consumer hardware stack, per Amon's own framing.
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