Qualcomm announced its fifth generation Snapdragon Cockpit platform – Snapdragon Cockpit Elite alongside Snapdragon Ride Elite targeting premium and advanced in-car experiences at its recent Snapdragon Summit 2024 in Maui, Hawaii USA. In a conversation at the Snapdragon Summit, Neil Shah, our VP of Research, interviewed Mark Granger, Qualcomm's Senior Director of Product Management for Automotive, about the evolution of digital vehicle cockpits. Granger emphasised the shift from traditional infotainment systems to integrated digital experiences that leverage advanced silicon and software, particularly in the context of software-defined vehicles (SDVs). He highlighted Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon cockpit platform Snapdragon Cockpit Elite, which features enhanced processing capabilities, including the new Oryon CPU and a powerful neural processing unit (NPU) for Gen AI experiences. The discussion covered how these technologies enable personalised, immersive experiences, such as driver recognition, multimodal interactions, and advanced navigation with 3D mapping. Granger also noted exciting partnerships with companies like Epic Games and Google to enhance these capabilities, ultimately transforming how users interact with their vehicles.

The Interview

Key Takeaways from the Discussion:

The Evolution of Cockpit & Infotainment systems

• The cockpit and dashboard in the car has evolved from all analog dials and AM/FM radio to modern digital cockpit with a min 10” touch and voice UI based infotainment systems with streaming media applications to HD live navigation and now powerful integrated Gen AI experiences.

• The cockpit essentially evolved into a digital twin of sensors and state of the car with stunning visuals and pertinent information while infotainment experiences have become richer, integrated and personalized and bringing “multimodality” into the experience.

The new Snapdragon Cockpit Elite Sporting new Oryon CPU & Powerful Hexagon NPU

• The new architecture for the Cockpit Elite is built ground up to power next generation premium cars

• The Oryon CPU cores we first saw in AI PCs come to car but completely redesigned with safety and automotive workloads in mind with 3x boost in performance vs previous gen

• The new Hexagon NPU brings in 12x performance boost to help bring new Gen AI experiences to the car

• GPU with 3x boost supporting 40+ multimodal sensors, real-time ray tracing, functional safety visual workloads such as 3D Digital twins, Maps

• The SoC also sports a DPU (Display Processor Unit) can drive 16+ 4K Displays in front and rear

• A dedicated subsystem for Audio to drive premium experiences such as with Dolby Laboratories Atmos, Noise Cancellations, etc

From SDV to Intelligent SDVs (iSDV).

• Ten years ago, ECUs were developed very separately by different teams, different OSs, maybe five or ten different boxes to do what we're kind of doing today in a single chip which are hard to maintain and update
• However, with Snapdragon SoC, Qualcomm has been able to raise the processing power into more centralized architecture with cloud-based development infrastructure making it easier for companies to design, develop and deploy software and deliver over time via OTA making it a perfect SDV.
• So, the OEMs get to benefit from this by delighting their customers for years after that initial purchase.

• In Cockpit context, Qualcomm is taking to next level into a iSDV making it more intelligent with powerful CPU , NPU and AI Stack tools to empower developers to bring in Gen AI experiences and features

Partnerships is key to Qualcomm’s & Industry’s Success

• As personalisation, pervasive intelligence and integrating premium experiences become important for automakers and the entire ecosystem to differentiate and provide more value to the customers.
• Qualcomm’s deeper and extensive partnerships with OEMs (e.g. BMW, Mercedes, Li Auto) to multiple players from Google, Dolby, Epic Games, SAP, AWS and others helps achieve the same

Analyst Takeaways:

• Automotive is tone of the key diversification success story for Qualcomm and expanding leadership from connectivity to a centralized compute architecture targeting cockpit, infotainment and autonomy.
• Qualcomm’s ground up built Snapdragon Cockpit Elite compute, software, AI Stack, car-to-cloud and connectivity marks a strong one stop shop integrated approach which will help automakers accelerate time to market but with differentiation.
• This also unlocks capabilities to bring advanced and premium experiences from digital cockpit with stunning real-time information with 3D visuals, richer infotainment, intelligent HD navigation and Gen AI personalised features.
• Further, strong partnerships with cutting-edge China ecosystem and outside with Google, BMW and other ecosystem players is helping Qualcomm expand is TAM at global-scale with potential to build upon its already multi-billion dollar per year pipeline.