According to foreign media reports, Qualcomm announced on November 16 that German automaker BMW will use its chips in the next generation of driver assistance and autonomous driving systems.
While Qualcomm, headquartered in San Diego, is the world’s largest supplier of smartphone chips, it has been committed to achieving business diversification. More than one-third of Qualcomm’s revenue comes from non-smartphone manufacturers. Automotive chips are a key growth area for Qualcomm’s business, which also provides information entertainment and dashboard chips for companies such as General Motors.
At the same time, Qualcomm also introduced how to collaborate with companies like Meta Platforms to develop virtual reality hardware and software, and collaborate with Microsoft to develop Windows computers that use Qualcomm chips.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon also said during an investor conference that the diversified Qualcomm company has a potential market of $700 billion, which is seven times that of the single market for smartphone chips.
According to BMW, Qualcomm’s new chips will be used in its “Neue Klasse” series of cars, and are expected to begin mass production in 2025. Qualcomm will work with BMW to use dedicated Qualcomm visual processing chips to process data from front, rear, and surround view cameras. BMW will also use Qualcomm chips to achieve communication between the car and cloud computing centers.
Although the cooperation with Qualcomm has been established, BMW also stated that it will continue to cooperate with Intel’s Mobileye autonomous driving department. Next year, BMW 7-Series cars using Intel technology will be released, which can achieve L3 level of autonomous driving.
🔗 Source: Reuters
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