高通似乎计划在明年初公布一款新的XR芯片组，可能是为了与苹果VisionProcompete.
Korean news mediaelectronic timesAccording to reports, they interviewed Hugo Swart, general manager and vice president of Qualcomm’s XR Division, at last week’s Snapdragon Summit 2023. Although the article is in Korean, all commonly used machine translation tools show that Swart was quoted by DigiTimes as saying that Qualcomm plans to release the next generation XR chip in the first quarter of 2024.
What could this chip be?
不到五周之前，高通在Meta Connect上公布了新一代Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2，这个芯片在本月早些时候首次在Quest 3中亮相。XR2 Gen 2是2020年首款XR2的继任者，基于高端安卓手机（如三星的Galaxy S23系列）使用的Snapdragon 8 Gen 2芯片。
Qualcomm last week unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is planned for high-end Android phones in 2024, although some Chinese companies like Xiaomi will use it this year. It's possible that the next generation XR chip is based on it, and if so, that would give it a 25% improvement in GPU performance and a 20-30% improvement in CPU performance. However, it seems a bit strange for Qualcomm to achieve such a small gain by adjusting the XR2 series from a three-year rhythm to a six-month rhythm.
Another possibility is that the new chip could be a new product line. Last week, Qualcomm also launched Snapdragon X, a new generation chipset for high-end laptops designed to compete with Apple's M-series chips. While all of Qualcomm's other chipsets use semi-custom CPU cores based on ARM designs, the Snapdragon X is the first to use fully custom "Oryon" cores. Oryon is the result of Qualcomm's 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, a startup founded in 2019 by former Apple and Google custom CPU engineers.
While Qualcomm's GPUs have been competitive with Apple's for years, its CPU cores have been several years behind Apple's. Qualcomm claims Oryon changes that and closes the gap with Apple's M2, so if it plans to use it in an XR chip, we might see a competitor with similar CPU performance to Apple's Vision Pro.
Vision Pro rivals from Samsung and LG?
DigiTimes further stated that no matter what form this new Snapdragon XR chip takes, it will be used in head-mounted devices that Samsung announced to develop in cooperation with Google, as well as LG’s head-mounted devices.
Last month, another South Korean news outlet, Maeil Business Newspaper, reported that LG was working with Meta to release the Quest Pro 2 in 2025. The report also pointed out that both Samsung and LG’s headsets will be priced around US$2,000 Meta, which is significantly higher than the Quest 3 but significantly lower than the Vision Pro.
So over the next few years we're likely to see three different high-end standalone XR options emerge, with fierce competition between them. As in the smartphone market, it looks like Qualcomm will provide hardware support for all of Apple's major competitors. But is there really room for three separate software platforms, or will Meta and Google be in a zero-sum competition to become "Android for XR"?
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