Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on more than 40 different AI wearable designs — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches — signaling how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next major computing platform won’t be a phone at all. To support that vision, Qualcomm announced 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.
Performance gains and on-device AI
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: the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for quick, responsive AI interactions.
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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. Higher per-eye resolution and frame rate produce sharper, smoother visuals, which matters most for reducing the motion sickness and eye strain that have historically made extended headset use uncomfortable.
Two device types, first partners
Qualcomm says the platform is designed to power two types of devices: standalone video-see-through (VST) headsets, which layer digital content over a camera feed of the real world, and lightweight, tethered optical-see-through (OST) glasses, which blend digital imagery directly into your field of view. Among the first devices to use it: XREAL Project Aura, shown at Google I/O earlier this year, and an upcoming device from Play for Dream.
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START: lowering the barrier for hardware makers
START consists of an AR chip, a software platform, companion apps, and a white-label program aimed at helping hardware makers get to market faster. Through the white-label program, Qualcomm is offering three reference designs: an audio + camera setup similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, a monocular display, and a binocular display. Eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and O’Neill — owned by TitanFlex — will be among the first partners in the white-label program. Qualcomm said START will expand beyond smart glasses to support other form factors in the future.
Amon’s strategic logic
Amon’s comments to CNBC flesh out the strategic logic behind both announcements. He argued that as companies seek to gather more real-world data from users to power their AI agents, a new wave of hardware startups building novel form factors will emerge, with major implications for established smartphone players like Apple and Samsung.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” Amon said. “Right now, we have over 40 designs of those devices, and I’m telling you, the types of form factors are very, very broad.” He added that “the principle is something that you wear, something [that] is with you all the time, something that can see the world around you, so you have context and have the ability for you to access an agent and talk to the agent.”
To that end, Qualcomm is explicitly positioning itself as the foundational silicon layer for whatever comes after the smartphone. START’s white-label program, in particular, is designed to lower the barrier for new entrants, making it easier for companies to experiment with wearable AI devices without building hardware from scratch.
