Meta and Qualcomm have signed a new multi-year agreement that will see future Meta VR headsets powered by Qualcomm chipsets customized for virtual reality.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, “We’re working with Qualcomm Technologies on customized virtual reality chipsets — powered by Snapdragon XR platforms and technology — for our future roadmap of Quest products.”
The chipsets will form part of Qualcomm’s existing Snapdragon extended reality (XR) platform, but developed in collaboration with Meta’s engineering and product teams to suit the company’s VR hardware and metaverse aspirations.
Zuckerberg explains(Opens in a new window) why this is necessary: “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. Unlike mobile phones, building virtual reality brings novel, multi-dimensional challenges in spatial computing, cost, and form factor.”
Meta and Qualcomm have a well-established relationship and the Meta Quest 2 headset runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 platform. This agreement looks to be deepening that relationship, though.
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As Reuters reports(Opens in a new window), Meta ultimately wants to develop custom silicon for use in its hardware, but in the meantime Qualcomm will continue to be the partner it relies on for VR chips. Qualcomm benefits through sales of its silicon to Meta, but the Snapdragon XR chipsets developed through this new agreement are not exclusive to Meta and therefore can be offered to other customers.
Yesterday, it was revealed that Arm is suing Qualcomm over the use of Nuvia chip designs and technology. It’s unclear how big of an impact losing this lawsuit would have on the future of Qualcomm’s high performance, low power chipsets, but the performance demands of virtual reality would surely benefit from the technology Nuvia developed.
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