SNAPDRAGON AIMS AT VR

New high-power mobile chip drives smart glasses

QUALCOMM HAS LAUNCHED a new flagship processor, the Snapdragon 835. It’s the first the company has built using a 10nm process. It has eight cores, four running at 2.45GHz and geared for performance, and four running at 1.9GHz and configured for efficiency. The company claims a 27 percent improvement on performance, and, more importantly, a drop of up to 40 percent in power consumption—although not at the same time. The new Adreno 540 GPU is 25 percent faster and now supports 10-bit 4K screens at 60Hz, which is pretty good going under any circumstances, let alone for something this small.

Much of the work has been geared toward improving VR, including eye-tracking in hardware, and support for Google’s Daydream VR. One of the first bits of gear to use an 835 comes from the Osterhout Design Group. It has produced two smart glasses: the $1,799 R-9, with an 1080p display, and the 720p $1,000 R-8. They both run Android and can display augmented, virtual, and mixed reality overlays. The company is best known for making headsets for the US military; this is its first foray into consumer sales.

The glasses are quite chunky and weigh in at 6oz and 4.5oz respectively. They might look cool enough in studio photographs, although whether you’ll look so cool walking around outside is another matter. Google Glass trod this path before, of course, although with much cruder hardware. It had all sorts of problems, not least concerns about privacy with the front-facing camera, which these two also sport. It does show what a powerful graphics engine the 835 has, though. We can expect to see this very capable chip in phones, mobile VR, and other tasty gadgets in the course of the year. Which is good for Qualcomm, because it has just been handed a $865 million fine by the South Korean Fair Trade Commission, for violation of anti-trust laws.