Qualcomm's new chip for wireless earbuds and smart glasses has more AI power

Besides two new high-end Snapdragon chips for smartphones, Qualcomm unveiled a new chip, the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, for “hearables.” Yes, that is what the company is calling smart glasses and wireless earbuds that are capable of running an AI assistant.

The Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 has 2x more on-device AI processing power, capable of up to 128 GOPS of AI computing. Moreover, it is 30% smaller and has 40% lower power consumption than the previous-generation chip, the Snapdragon S7 Gen 1 Sound Platform.

It has a dual-core Arm Cortex-M55 CPU and an eNPU 6 neural network accelerator. It also features three audio digital signal processors (DSPs). Besides Bluetooth 7.0 (ready) with aptX Lossless and XPAN technology for up to 192kHz audio over Wi-Fi, the chip also features Wi-Fi 6E, so smart glasses and wireless earbuds equipped with AI assistants can reach AI models stored on the cloud.

The chip also supports cameras, which means smart glasses or wireless earbuds with onboard cameras can be used for contextual image and scene recognition from the real world.

The Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 also features 5th-generation Qualcomm Adaptive Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and Qualcomm cVc (Clear Voice Capture) for clearer audio during calls or AI interaction. This chip can be used in traditional in-ear wireless earbuds, over-the-ear headphones, open-ear earbuds, and audio glasses.