At their press event today at CES, Qualcomm announced a new processor that they are looking to sell to auto makers in the Snapdragon 820A. It supports QNX, Android Auto and Apple’s CarPlay. It can also control the cluster in the dashboard of the car. This isn’t Qualcomm’s first attempt at creating a processor for car makers to put in their vehicles. The Snapdragon 602A was announced two years ago, and Audi is now on board to use it in their 2017 fleet of vehicles. The Snapdragon 820A is based off of the Snapdragon 820, as you probably figured out. So it’s still a 64-bit chip, and also using the Adreno 530 GPU.
In the demo below, Qualcomm explains what exactly the Snapdragon 820A can do in the car. While it won’t mean much for the end-user, it will be a pretty good contender for auto makers. Especially with NVIDIA’s offerings also on the table. The Snapdragon 820A likely won’t be made available in cars on the road until the end of this year, at the earliest. Qualcomm is planning on beginning to sample the new processor this quarter to their partners, and at the earliest, we’d see it in the 2018 model year.