You may have seen announcements last Fall about Meta teaming up Qualcomm, the world‘s leading smartphone chipmaker, to develop specialized processors for virtual and augmented reality. This collaboration aims to supercharge Meta‘s metaverse ambitions – their vision for an immersive next generation of social connection and remote collaboration. What exactly does this deal entail though, and how might it shape Meta‘s roadmap for future metaverse hardware? As an industry analyst focused on emerging technologies, let me unpack the details and implications for you.
Why Meta Needed a Partner for Custom Silicon
First some background. Creating the building blocks for the metaverse requires pushing boundaries on devices with capabilities far beyond smartphones. Things like real-time photorealistic 3D environments, precise tracking of users‘ movements and senses, and advanced simulation of real world physics demand extreme amounts of computing power.
Meta originally planned to design these complex chips completely in-house. However, as seen in Table 1, efforts like their smartwatch processor and AR glasses chipset faced repeated setbacks:
Table 1. Meta‘s Past Attempts at Internal Chip Development
| Project | Timeline | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Smartwatch System-on-Chip | 2021 | Cancelled due to technical issues |
| AR Glasses Chipset | 2022 | Reportedly struggled, development rebooted |
Creating specialized processors combines intricate expertise across silicon design, manufacturing, connectivity, analytics and more. I should emphasize it took Apple over a decade to perfect their renowned mobile device chips. For Meta, partnering with veteran experts made far more sense than reinventing the wheel alone. This leads us to Qualcomm.
Why Qualcomm was an Ideal Partner
Qualcomm pioneered smartphone technology over 30 years ago and still leads the market today. As shown in Figure 1 below, Qualcomm has maintained an impressive ~30% global market share of mobile processors for Android devices:
Figure 1. Qualcomm Smartphone Chip Market Share 2013-2022. Source: Counterpoint Research
Within virtual and augmented reality, Qualcomm moved swiftly to dominate the headset chip space. Their Snapdragon XR line powers standalone VR/AR models from numerous manufacturers already – including Meta‘s popular Quest 2 headset.
Technically, Snapdragon integrates high performance ARM-based CPU cores alongside potent graphics and AI hardware, video encoders/decoders, 5G modems, advanced image signal processors, and more – all while maintaining efficiency. These capabilities translated nicely to handling intensive tasks like spatially-mapped environment tracking at 72fps for accurate user positioning in VR. Qualcomm clearly possessed ideal expertise for collaborating with Meta on custom silicon specialized even further for emerging metaverse workloads.
What We Know About the Meta-Qualcomm Partnership
In September 2022, Meta and Qualcomm publicly announced a "multiyear strategic partnership" to develop "custom virtual reality chipsets". Statements suggest these processors aim specifically to enable the unique demands of Meta‘s metaverse roadmap.
While concrete technical details remain confidential for competitive reasons, Table 2 summarizes high level information known about the deal:
Table 2. Meta-Qualcomm Partnership Known Details
| Term | Description |
|-|-|
| Focus | "Custom virtual reality chipsets" |
| Timeline | Multi-year agreement |
| Goal | Tackle complex metaverse applications |
Both companies emphasized needing to push boundaries on areas like low latency connectivity and immersive graphics rendering. Reading between the lines, it seems reasonable to expect Qualcomm will customize and extend their existing Snapdragon architecture with tighter integration of key accelerators intended for metaverse experiences. Rather than a brand new chip, this resembles an enhanced VR/AR-centric Snapdragon variant codesigned hand-in-hand with Meta‘s engineers.
How Custom Silicon Could Unlock The Metaverse
While we await reveal of the co-developed hardware itself, what might this new platform enable for Meta‘s metaverse vision? I foresee enhancements across three key areas:
1. Photorealistic Social Environments
Dedicated graphics, video and neural processing tuned specifically for tasks like spatial mapping, lighting physics, foveated rendering and avatar animation should radically improve visual quality in Meta Horizon environments. Users could finally interact as personalized high fidelity human models rather than as cartoon avatars. Surrounding virtual spaces may soon pass as replicas of real world locales.
2. Seamless Augmented Reality
Collaborating this closely allows deeply integrating trained computer vision algorithms directly into the silicon design itself. That could prove critical for tackling extremely latency-sensitive challenges involved in plausible augmented reality, like handling proper occlusion and coordination between rendered graphics and real world camera feeds.
3. Enhanced Interactivity
With extra headroom reserved for metaverse workloads rather than legacy smartphone functionality, more CPU and GPU bandwidth should free up for additional capabilities. Mixed reality business meetings could overlay immersive productivity software without compromising fluid social interactions simultaneously. Or less latency coupled with added sensor integration paves the way for more intricate hand tracking techniques down the line.
Leading analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo already predict Meta‘s deal with Qualcomm will accelerate its product roadmap compared to competitors. While still early, Meta‘s partnership approach looks to pay dividends in carving an immersive social path towards our collective metaverse future. I for one am excited to see what cutting edge hardware this formidable Qualcomm alliance yields in the coming years.
