Qualcomm introduces the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite for vehicles

21 October 2024

During this year's Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm introduced two new high-end chips for the automotive industry - Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite. The two chips are part of the company's Snapdragon Digital Chassis portfolio and use Qualcomm's brand new Oryon CPU.

As the names imply, the Cockpit Elite is responsible for the infotainment system inside the cabin, while the Ride Elite handles the outside world and advanced self-driving systems. The interesting bit is that car manufacturers will have the option to combine the two into one SoC due to their flexible architecture.

Of course, the SoCs feature a powerful NPU with 12x the performance boost compared to the previous Qualcomm cockpit platforms, which proves to be useful for the in-cabin experience as well as the decision-making process of the advanced driving assist systems.

The new Adreno GPU on board then handles the in-cabin multimedia experience. It supports context-aware applications and advanced multimedia and gaming capabilities with three times the performance of the previous generation.

Some safety features are also baked in to ensure continuous operation at all times. Thanks to the safety island controller, ADAS functions are always on.

A new unified software framework will make it easier for manufacturers to scale, implement and upgrade features via a cloud-based workbench. This, in turn, means that companies can push new features faster.

Qualcomm's new Elite Ride platform has the eyes too. The powerful ISP can handle and process information from 40 multimodal sensors, 20 of which can be high-resolution cameras for not just the outside world but for 360-degree in-cabin monitoring.

Other notable features include support for AI-enabled zonal audio and support for 16 displays with 4K resolution.