Qualcomm landed a “multi-year” deal with Meta to develop custom chipsets for a future series of the tech giant’s virtual-reality (VR) products. The chips are intended for Meta’s Oculus Quest family of VR headsets.
These new chips, which will reside at the heart of Meta’s hardware, will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR series of mixed-reality processors. “Mixed reality” refers to a host of technologies that blur the line between physical and digital worlds. The term covers virtual- and augmented-reality technologies.
This is not a completely unprecedented move for Meta. In the smartphone market, companies ranging from Apple to Samsung have invested in in-house chip designs to help cut costs, improve performance, and boost battery life. These attributes stem from the tight integration of silicon and the software that runs on top of it. Bonus points: They can roll out unique features that they would struggle to get with standard-issue silicon.
Other sectors of the consumer electronics market have been reshaped by bespoke silicon. For many years, Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox consoles have been powered by semi-custom chips made by AMD.
Meta hopes to use the custom chips to reduce the high cost of its hardware and improve performance for what it calls “spatial computing” to create more unique experiences for users.
Engineering and product teams from both companies will work together to develop the chips. The joint effort looks to create virtual-reality headsets in a form factor and at a price point that consumers will buy and use.
“As we continue to build more advanced capabilities and experiences for virtual and augmented reality, it has become more important to build specialized technologies to power our future VR headsets and other devices,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Unlike mobile phones, building virtual reality brings novel, multidimensional challenges in spatial computing, cost, and form factor. These chipsets will help us keep pushing virtual reality to its limits," he added.
Meta is no stranger to Qualcomm. They have been collaborating closely on virtual reality for several years, and Qualcomm’s latest mixed-reality chip, the XR2 5G, powers Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 headset.
Introduced in late 2019, the Snapdragon XR2 contains a high-performance CPU and GPU to handle heavy-duty graphics and other workloads, and it can be paired with Qualcomm’s modem silicon to connect to 5G networks.
The Snapdragon XR2 contains a “visual analytics” engine (EVA) that is specifically designed to offload and speed up workloads related to virtual reality, slashing latency that causes images broadcast on virtual-reality displays to lag. The heterogenous compute architecture in the XR2 helps prolong battery life for Meta’s headset, giving consumers up to approximately three hours of playtime on a single charge.
XR2 can also carry out AI chores 10X faster than Qualcomm’s previous-generation mixed-reality chip to help enhance the user’s sense of presence and ability to easily explore virtual worlds when wearing a headset. The chips that Qualcomm will supply to Meta will probably have improvements to many of the same areas.
These investments in VR hardware fit into Meta’s broader ambitions for the metaverse. The term refers to a sprawling web of virtual worlds that blur the line between physical and digital realms, where it wants consumers to work and play in the very near future. The company has staked its future on the concept, with it spending more than $10 billion in 2021 alone to help advance the underlying technology in the metaverse.
While many of these imaginary worlds will be powered by, and housed in, colossal data centers, users will have to access these digital spaces with virtual-reality hardware such as Meta’s Oculus Quest series.
Meta reportedly has plans to roll out four new Oculus VR headsets by 2024. Thus, it makes sense for the company to focus on custom chips to further differentiate them from rivals and add more unique features.
For Qualcomm, the agreement with Meta is proof that it is executing on a strategy put in place years ago by CEO Cristiano Amon to land its chips in a wide range of new hardware. Last year, he said the Qualcomm-powered Oculus Quest 2 has shipped more than 10 million units globally, referring to third-party estimates.
The chips produced through the collaboration will reportedly not be exclusive to Meta. The deal also opens the door for Qualcomm to gain a deeper understanding of where the market for mixed reality is heading.
Qualcomm sells chips to several virtual-reality hardware makers, and it plays in the market for augmented-reality (AR) products that overlay digital objects on a physical scene and allow users to interact with them.
Earlier this year, it announced a new partnership with Microsoft to develop custom chips for AR glasses.