Cristiano Amon, chief executive of mobile chip powerhouse Qualcomm, on Tuesday updated investors on his company’s plans for 5G and the Internet of things, making the case the company will dominate chips for what he called “Iot Next,” the new frontier of the Internet of Things, including The Metaverse.
“If you are going to spend time in the Metaverse, Snapdragon is going to be your ticket to the Metaverse,” said Amon, referring to the company’s mobile application processor and modem platform.
Amon spoke at an in-person event held at Gotham Hall, a beaux-art bank building near Herald Square in Manhattan.
The majority of Metaverse-style devices “you see now,” such as Facebook’s Oculus Quest, are “powered by Snapdragon,” said Amon. Quest 2, he said, has sold ten million units and “had a big impact” on Qualcomm.
Amon displayed on the giant video screen behind him a quote from Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg from the Facebook developer conference, Connect, during which Zuckerberg first introduced the Metaverse and the company name change to Meta.
“We have been working on this with Qualcomm for years,” said Zuckerberg in the quote,
And Quest 2 is the first major consumer device that runs on the Snapdragon XR2 platform. It’s fully customized for VR and AR with support for multiple cameras and technology like fixed foveated rendering. The end result is a more immersive experience with crisper graphics, more dynamic environments, and ultimately a more realistic feeling of presence.
The entire category of “XR,” including AR and VR, can be “bigger than mobile,” said Amon.
In addition to the Metaverse, Amon discussed consumer and industrial aspects of what he called IoT Next. One of those consumer aspects is the “transformation” of the PC, said Amon. The PC is becoming more like a phone, he said, citing the need for constant cloud connectivity to run video games and to collaborate.
“We are very well positioned to be the preferred provider for PCs for the inevitable transition to ARM,” said Amon, referring to the ARM-based CPUs that compete with CPUs from Intel and AMD. Qualcomm is working on its next-generation CPU for Snapdragon, which Qualcomm CTO Jim Thompson said will be shown in six months’ time.
