Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside whatever replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products toward that end

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on over 40 different AI wearable devices — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches — a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next major computing platform won’t be a phone at all. To power that vision, Qualcomm is announcing two new offerings: a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed reality glasses, designed to run more powerful on-device AI, and the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START), a combination of hardware modules and a software stack for AI devices, starting with smart glasses. Compared to its previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers improvements of up to 60% in GPU performance, up to 30% in CPU performance, and up to 160% in NPU performance, according to the company. Percentage gains in chip specs can be hard to contextualize, but Qualcomm offers one concrete data point, saying the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for quick, responsive AI interactions. Qualcomm says the chip will also enable better head and hand tracking, along with improved see-through capabilities. The Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K per-eye resolution at 90 fps, a modest bump from the XR2+ Gen 2’s 4.3K per-eye resolution. …