Qualcomm Incorporated officially announced Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, a new flagship platform designed for compact, fully wireless headphones, full-size headphones, audio glasses and other wearable devices that work completely autonomously without the need for a smartphone, tablet or PC. It has built-in artificial intelligence accelerator and Wi-Fi support.
Image source: Qualcomm
Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 differs from traditional audio platforms in that the wireless headphones are not considered peripherals but rather small standalone computers. Compared with its predecessor, the new platform’s artificial intelligence performance has been doubled; at the same time, its energy consumption has been reduced by 40%, and its physical size has been reduced by 30%. The built-in artificial intelligence accelerator has a performance of up to 128 GOPS, which is billions of operations per second. This isn’t just a single scenario: the chip handles artificial intelligence algorithms, audio, communications, sensor data and status monitoring functions simultaneously. Qualcomm allows some AI features to run continuously without significantly reducing battery life.
The main processor is an Arm Cortex-M55; there’s a Qualcomm eNPU neural processor, a Hi-Fi 3 DSP audio subsystem for low-latency tasks, and a pair of more powerful Hi-Fi 5 audio DSPs – this allows you to distribute different types of load between dedicated units.
The most important feature of the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 is support for Wi-Fi 6E – the chip can connect to networks in the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands and work directly with cloud services, bypassing the connection to the smartphone, although it can also connect to the smartphone via Wi-Fi thanks to Qualcomm’s XPAN technology. Supports Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE Audio and Bluetooth High Data Throughput, as well as the aptX lossless codec for lossless audio transmission. There is also a fifth-generation adaptive active noise reduction system. Qualcomm cVc Voice technology is responsible for speech clarity.
Developers emphasize that the Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 platform can be used not only for traditional TWS headsets, but also for smart glasses and completely wireless headsets with built-in cameras – which will begin to appear in large numbers in the foreseeable future. Qualcomm is expected to launch its own Snapdragon Sound Apps & Agents ecosystem – manufacturers will be able to create software for the audio platform. These will be artificial intelligence assistants, translation services, jobs and other applications that respond to user requests.
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