Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon stated 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.
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 with 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. Qualcomm offers one concrete data point, stating the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for quick, responsive AI interactions.
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 translate to sharper and smoother visual experiences, which matters most for reducing the motion sickness and eye strain that have historically made prolonged headset use uncomfortable.
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, display-free AI glasses that provide audio-based AI assistant interactions. The START toolkit gives manufacturers pre-tested reference designs, certified component lists, and software stacks that reduce development time from years to months.
Amon’s broader point is that the smartphone form factor has plateaued, and the next wave of growth in personal computing will come from devices that are always on, always connected, and worn rather than carried. Qualcomm wants to be inside all of them, just as it is inside virtually every Android phone today.
