Qualcomm is getting into the self-driving market

Enlarge / Qualcomm sign. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm, the dominant provider of cellular modem chips, is the latest chip giant to seek a slice of the autonomous driving market. At the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Ride platform, which uses chips derived from Qualcomm’s mobile products to help a vehicle drive.

It might seem strange for a smartphone chip company to tackle self-driving, but in reality, many of the same technologies exist in both products. Qualcomm has long leveraged its mobile chip lead to grab a significant chunk of the broader system-on-a-chip market. Smartphone makers buy Qualcomm Snapdragon chips that contain an ARM-based CPU, modem chip, and various support chips.

In recent years, Qualcomm and other mobile chipmakers have been including increasingly powerful GPUs and dedicated AI chips in their SoC products—precisely the kind of silicon required for driving software based on machine learning. So it’s not much of a leap for Qualcomm to launch a new SoC that includes (as Qualcomm’s press release puts it) “high-performance multi-core CPUs, energy-efficient AI and computer vision (CV) engines, industry-leading GPU.”