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Qualcomm’s Cockpit Platform promises to make cars smarter

Qualcomm used its CES press conference today to announce the third generation of its Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform, its latest AI-centric platform for building in-car experiences that include everything from voice-driven interfaces to good-old navigation systems, all with modern visual interfaces.

The platform now comes in three tiers — Performance, Premiere and Paramount — for entry-level, mid-tier and high-end platforms. The core is the same, though, and builds on the Snapdragon 820A platform with supports for the company’s AI Engine, signal processor, CPUs and GPUs.

Automotive at CES 2019 - TechCrunch

It also includes the Qualcomm Hexagon Processor, an accelerator for running machine learning models for use cases like natural language processing and object classification, as well as Qualcomm Vision camera sensors and computer vision hardware. The Vision part isn’t meant to power self-driving cars, though. Instead, it’s meant to “support differentiated use-cases on lane-level crowdsourcing of drive data for building map layers.” What the platform does offer, though, is support for contextual safety for driving assistant features like in-cabin monitoring and surround view monitoring.

“With our 3rd Generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platforms, we are reiterating our commitment to bring highly differentiated and customizable in-car experiences to our customers,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president of product management, Qualcomm Technologies. “Our new Snapdragon Automotive Platforms are designed to deliver a concurrent implementation of next generation high-resolution digital instrument clusters with industry leading infotainment technologies supported through artificial intelligence capabilities, leading edge graphics for high-resolution multiple display configurations, vision enhanced precise positioning for supporting safer and smarter navigation, much more.”

The platform is now available to the automotive industry and the company’s development tools for the automotive industry now support it.

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