Qualcomm is getting into the self-driving market

Enlarge / Qualcomm sign. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm, the dominant provider of cellular modem chips, is the latest chip giant to seek a slice of the autonomous driving market. At the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Ride platform, which uses chips derived from Qualcomm's mobile products to help a vehicle drive.

It might seem strange for a smartphone chip company to tackle self-driving, but in reality, many of the same technologies exist in both products. Qualcomm has long leveraged its mobile chip lead to grab a significant chunk of the broader system-on-a-chip market. Smartphone makers buy Qualcomm Snapdragon chips that contain an ARM-based CPU, modem chip, and various support chips.

In recent years, Qualcomm and other mobile chipmakers have been including increasingly powerful GPUs and dedicated AI chips in their SoC products-precisely the kind of silicon required for driving software based on machine learning. So it's not much of a leap for Qualcomm to launch a new SoC that includes (as Qualcomm's press release puts it) "high-performance multi-core CPUs, energy-efficient AI and computer vision (CV) engines, industry-leading GPU."

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