Qualcomm is negotiating to offer chip-design services to China's ByteDance, as the US firm aims to lessen its reliance on the smartphone market, its primary revenue generator, according to reports.
If the negotiations succeed, ByteDance, the owner of the short-video app TikTok, will become one of the first clients of Qualcomm's chip-design services division.
Qualcomm is the leading provider of modem chips for smartphones, which handle cellular communications.
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The discussions indicate that US technology companies are still eager to operate in China, despite escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing regarding AI chips affecting firms like Nvidia, AMD, Applied Materials, and Lam Research.
According to reports, Qualcomm is in talks to create custom chips for ByteDance. The chips would partially rely on technology owned by AlphaWave Semi, a high-speed connectivity expert that Qualcomm purchased last year.
While the talks are in progress, the result remains unclear. The outcome of the discussions regarding a completed chip design and production was uncertain, and they mentioned that ByteDance might seek other collaborators.
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The talks are centered on creating video processing units (VPUs), aiming to commence mass production by year-end.
A partnership with ByteDance would represent a major triumph for Qualcomm, which has encountered instability from smartphone manufacturers this year due to rising memory-chip costs.
Global smartphone shipments are expected to experience the sharpest yearly decline ever recorded this year.
Earlier, Qualcomm Technologies announced today at the Augmented World Expo the Snapdragon® Reality Elite Platform, crafted to deliver immersive spatial computing experiences featuring exceptional visual quality and deeply embedded on-device AI across various form factors. It will drive high-performance all-in-one video-see-through (VST) headsets and lightweight tethered optical-see-through (OST).
Snapdragon Reality Elite aims to provide enhanced on-device AI capabilities, achieving up to 48 TOPS, facilitating extensive language and vision models that enable a new generation of generative XR experiences. These features facilitate everything from photorealistic avatars using Gaussian Splatting and LLM-based agents to real-time large vision model (LVM)-inspired object creation, introducing dynamic digital content into the user's surroundings.
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These AI capabilities enable XR experiences to react instantly, exhibiting enhanced contextual understanding and facilitating more organic interactions. Moreover, Snapdragon Reality Elite improves head and hand tracking while enabling see-through capabilities, allowing users to interact more effortlessly with digital content and their surrounding environment.
Snapdragon platforms are central to the XR ecosystem, encompassing Android XR, offering the performance, efficiency, and AI features that drive a variety of headsets and glasses from prominent OEMs and partners. Snapdragon Reality Elite maintains this progress, acting as a core platform for XREAL Project Aura, set to launch later this year, and Play for Dream’s forthcoming device, with more products anticipated to come.