Qualcomm’s latest chip hints that more powerful smart glasses could be on the way

Smart glasses are still a nascent category, but chipmaker Qualcomm is hard at work upgrading the silicon to power the next wave of XR devices: the Snapdragon Reality Elite. Although Qualcomm is announcing the chip today at Augmented World Expo, we’ve technically already gotten a hands-on with a device powered by the new chip at last month’s Google I/O: the forthcoming Aura glasses for Android XR. At the time, Xreal and Google were coy about the processor upgrades to the long-awaited spectacles. Turns out, it was the Reality Elite. Spec-wise, the new chip focuses on across-the-board performance upgrades. The GPU gets a 60 percent bump, the CPU gets a 30 percent increase, and the NPU gets “up to 160 percent higher performance.” It supports 4.4K resolution at 90 frames per second per eye and less latency. Battery life has also been improved by up to 20 percent, and Qualcomm was able to improve cooling as well by boosting power efficiency. Supposedly, while handling heavy workloads, the Reality Elite will remain up to 12 degrees Celsius cooler than Qualcomm’s last-gen XR chips. In other words, this chip ought to support better visuals for immersive XR experiences, more power to handle larger LLMs for AI features, and lighter, longer-lasting glasses. You know, all the technical problems currently plaguing the smart glasses space . …