Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit – Family Matters

Automotive joins the Oryon family.

• In what was an obvious move, Qualcomm has rolled the Oryon custom CPU into its automotive product offering that will give OEMs a greater opportunity to push back against the predations of the digital ecosystems on their livelihoods.
• Qualcomm has launched two new chipsets the Cockpit Elite (for infotainment) and Ride Elite (for ADAS) that incorporates the Oryon custom CPU into automotive for the first time.
• This is the third product category to migrate to Oryon and I am expecting that all of the other categories such as XR, wearables and so on will quickly follow.
• The Oryon CPU used in the Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite has been heavily customised for the automotive use case to incorporate the reliability and safety requirements that are required for critical systems like the instrument cluster or the driver assistance.
• Hence, I suspect that this is a variant of the first generation of the core that is used in the X Elite and X Plus but given the headline improvement that is being targeted, this does not matter very much.
• Using 1^st generation is not a bad idea as it leaves space for another big jump in 2025 should a new version incorporate either the 2^nd generation or the 3^rd generation core that Qualcomm has hinted will be launched next year.
• Normally one would expect that the Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite might make it into the 2028 or 2029 model years, but things are moving much more quickly these days.
• This is a result of needing to keep up with China where its 200 EV OEMs are moving very quickly to a central compute architecture which allows all of the software in the vehicle to be both integrated for a better experience and updated over the air.
• This combined with the need to keep Apple and Google at bay is lighting a fire underneath the non-Chinese OEMs and so I think we could easily vehicles in the market with these new chipsets in 2026 (certainly in China and maybe elsewhere too).
• Nowhere is the acceleration of change more evident than in the demonstrations brought to Snapdragon Summit by Qualcomm’s partners were all but one of the software builds on display in the vehicles were already obsolete.
• The new CPU cores and the updates to the GPU and NPU are expected to bring a 3x improvement in the CPU and a 12x improvement in AI performance compared to the previous generation meaning that no benchmarking is really necessary.
• Also new is Snapdragon Ride Flex which was originally expected to be an SoC but has been changed to a software platform.
• Originally this would have been a single SoC that could run both digital cockpit and ADAS but this has changed to a platform that basically achieves the same thing.
• At the moment, this is all about bringing infotainment and ADAS services to lower trim levels by reducing the cost of implementation.
• A premium vehicle with a full Qualcomm implementation will have both a Digital Cockpit chip and a Ride chip but Flex will allow an OEM to implement both infotainment and ADAS using just a Digital Cockpit chip.
• As a result of being a software platform, this will mean that any of the digital cockpit and ride portfolio should be able to work in this way which should greatly increase the reach into the lower end of the market.
• This was a solid update from the automotive business which remains in a very strong position in the industry although it will be facing more competition as competitors launch new chip designs.
• However, Qualcomm is now seen by much of the industry as the standard for infotainment (digital cockpit) as well as rapidly gaining share in ADAS.
• Hence, it remains a staple in the industry and I see no immediate danger to its long-term forecasts around pipeline and revenues.
• I am still very happy to hold the shares.