International. Qualcomm unveiled a new line of custom-made chips for smart cameras. The new lineup is called the Vision Intelligence Platform and aims to get AI features, extreme low-light image processing, image stabilization, and computer vision capabilities on more cameras, and do better than a repurposed smartphone chip.
The chips are designed for almost any camera that can make use of processing-intensive features: sports cameras, security cameras, 360-degree cameras, and even robots (e.g., something like a Roomba) that need to navigate, among others. The chips support 4K video, multiple video streams at lower resolutions, 360 video stitching, WQHD displays, bypassing obstacles, and creating video highlight reels for action cameras.
It will be up to the hardware manufacturers using these chips to take advantage of those features and, in fact, develop them. But Qualcomm's goal is to make it easier for hardware companies to implement them and allow them to be deployed better than they could with other chips. Because there's dedicated hardware for many of these functions, Qualcomm says they'll consume less power while performing better than they would if they ran on a more general-purpose chip.
The first two chips in the lineup, the QCS605 and QCS603 (unrelated to the Snapdragon 600 series), are designed for Wi-Fi cameras, as neither has an LTE radio. The 605 supports 4K video at 60fps, and the 603 supports 4K video at 30fps.
This isn't Qualcomm's first attempt to offer chips for smart cameras. This was already done in the past, but reused Snapdragon chips were always used, for example, one ended up in the Nest Cam IQ. This is the first time Qualcomm has offered chips specially designed for smart cameras, meaning future generations of these products could start moving forward a little faster.
Qualcomm has already started testing 605 chips for hardware partners and expects products that use them to come out in the second half of the year.
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