Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon Elite platforms for automotive applications at its Snapdragon Summit event today.

Powered by Qualcomm Oryon — the company’s fastest central processing unit (CPU) — these new platforms are the latest additions to the Snapdragon Digital Chassis (first introduced in 2022) portfolio.

They’re designed to bring intelligence to next-generation vehicles. Automakers have the option to
utilize Snapdragon Cockpit Elite to power advanced digital experiences and Snapdragon Ride
Elite to power automated driving capabilities.

Through its unique flexible architecture, automakers will also have an option to seamlessly combine both digital cockpit and automated driving functionalities on the same SoC – an innovative capability available on Snapdragon Digital Chassis solutions.

“Qualcomm Technologies remains at the forefront of innovation with platforms like Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite, as the automotive industry evolves towards centralized computing, Qualcomm
software defined vehicles and AI-driven architectures,” said Nakul Duggal, group manager, automotive, industrial, and cloud at Qualcomm, in a statement. “With our strongest performing compute, graphics and AI capabilities, coupled with industry leading power efficiency and cutting-edge software enablement for digital cockpits and automated driving, these new Elite Snapdragon automotive platforms address the industry’s needs for higher compute levels, empowering automakers to redefine automotive experiences for their customers.”

Ana Arnold, who works in product and technology marketing at Qualcomm, said in a product briefing that software-defined technology and AI are driving rapid change in cars. She noted hundreds of millions of vehicles already use Qualcomm tech on the road. The new platforms deliver versatility for both autonomous driving and in-cabin car systems — or both through platforms that combine the different chips, Arnold said.

Unified architecture with higher AI performance

The dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), designed for multimodal AI, offers a 12-times performance boost over previous cockpit platforms, enabling real-time external environment and cabin data processing.

This advance facilitates live decision-making, adaptive responses, and proactive assistance, ensuring
personalized in-cabin car experiences.

Mark Granger, senior director of product management, said in a press briefing that the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite is focused on the interior cabin space, like the dashboard. The Snapdragon Ride Elite, meanwhile, is focused on ADAS, or Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, and autonomous vehicles.

“We see the advent of large language models and multimodal models that are adept at running on the edge,” Granger said. “So we’re very excited with what we see as a huge leap in performance and capability.”

To date, LLMs have had real challenges understanding and responding to to Chinese and Japanese speakers. The new tech can now address this. Granger said the company is not yet disclosing the exact amount of TOPS performance when it comes to AI processing.

Equipped with transformer accelerators and vector engines, along with mixed precision support, the NPU in Snapdragon Ride Elite is designed to deliver low-latency, highly accurate, and efficient end-to-end transformers, maintaining optimal power and performance.

The heterogeneous platform seamlessly runs multiple applications without performance loss, offering exceptional concurrency and multitasking for numerous cameras, sensors, rich user experiences and advanced AI-enabled audio with virtualization.

Automakers can create configurable software-defined vehicles (SDVs) for all tiers, providing flexibility and scalability while simplifying vehicle architecture. This architecture results in accelerated deployment schedules, ensuring customers can enjoy the latest innovations and features more quickly than before.

Qualcomm said the new chips are engineered to deliver exceptional performance while minimizing energy consumption. That helps ensure that vehicles operate smarter and longer. The solution is a combination of intelligent power management hardware and software that balances core utilization and application runtime.

The chips are also designed for context-aware applications. This platform is designed to enable hands-free, unsupervised automated driving that anticipates needs, along with real-time driver monitoring and enhanced object detection for a smoother, more confident ride.

Its improved Adreno GPU targeting to deliver a three-times performance boost with advanced rendering capabilities, meeting demands for gaming, multimedia, and dynamic driver information.

The platforms are also designed to meet automotive safety standards for ASIL-D systems with a dedicated safety island controller and robust hardware architecture for isolation and interference-free operation, helping to ensure reliable quality-of-service for specific ADAS functions, as well as comfort and confidence from drivers and passengers.

Purpose-built for the industry’s shift to SDVs, the elite-tier platform is designed to take an end-to-end approach for enhanced safety, security, and upgradeability through the unified software framework that emphasizes software reuse; designed to help automakers accelerate feature development via a cloud-based workbench, streamlining software development for continuous improvement and reducing time to market for new features and services.

The automotive platforms also feature a powerful, efficient camera system with an advanced Image Signal
Processor (ISP) for clear, responsive visuals in extreme driving conditions. They support over 40 multimodal sensors, including up to 20 high-resolution cameras for 360-degree coverage and in-cabin monitoring, Arnold said. She noted in-cabin sensors are now important inside the cabin to detect whether a driver is sleepy or not and the car needs to do something about that, like sending an audio alert.

Compatible with the latest and upcoming automotive sensors and formats, our platforms use AI-enhanced imaging tools to deliver optimized image quality for both enhanced in-cabin experiences and advanced safety features.

The automotive platforms will use Qualcomm’s software stack, supporting multiple operating systems. The Snapdragon Ride Elite platform is an end-to-end automated driving system with advanced features like vision perception, sensor fusion, path planning, localization, and complete vehicle control.

Snapdragon Cockpit Elite offers support for rich multimedia features, on-device AI with fully integrated edge orchestrator, optimized gaming and advanced 3D graphics for rich user experiences, and comes with safety, security and long-term support (API compatibility) features built into the design.

The Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite will be available for sampling in 2025. As for the average cycle time on design cycles for cars, Granger said the time has certainly come down over many years (it used to take five years to get new parts designed into cars) and continues to accelerate, Granger said.

3D printing objects using metal is a well-established technique, but it tends to be too complex, expensive, or imprecise to match traditional methods at scale. Armed with $14 million from Nvidia and Boeing, Freeform aims to change that by building a new metal additive printing process that it says changes the game — and yes, there’s an AI angle, too.

Co-founders Erik Palitsch (CEO) and TJ Ronacher (president) both worked at SpaceX, where they were principal architect and lead analyst, respectively, of the Merlin engines and other programs. While there, they saw the potential of 3D printing parts using metal, but also experienced the method’s shortcomings firsthand.

“We saw the potential of metal printing; it has the potential to transform basically any industry that makes metal things. But adoption has been slow and success has been marginal at best,” said Palitsch. “Why is it not practical to use at scale? Fundamentally, because of three things: crappy and inconsistent quality; speed — commercial printers are very slow; and cost — the price for these printers is astronomical.”

They concluded that if they could operationalize the process to provide a printing service rather than sell a printer, they could crack the whole thing wide open. So they joined up with Tasso Lappas, former CTO of Velo3D, to start Freeform.

The primary mistake companies were making was using the likes of CNC machines, which are commonly used in traditional manufacturing, as a model for the metal-printing business. In that case, you sell the machine and its software, and make it work with whatever shapes and processes you use. But metal additive is different, Palitsch said.

“The way these things work today is they’re ‘open loop’ — they’re basically playing back a file,” he explained. “They needed to be smarter than that, because the process by which you melt metal powder with a laser is extremely complicated, and in a way infinitely variable.”

Selling people a machine and saying “become an expert to make it work, good luck,” isn’t a recipe for success.

“But when you decide you’re not going to build and package a printer into a box, when you have the freedom to build an automated factory from clean sheet, there’s a lot you can do,” Palitsch said.

Their solution is to provide printing as a service using a closed-loop process in a custom machine that monitors the print on a microsecond scale, adjusting various factors to achieve the kind of print that is expected at a workplace like SpaceX.

The company has plenty of tech advances to boast of, but the two most immediately relevant are the feedback loop and the AI that manages it.

“We have high-speed computer vision feedback on our system that runs at microsecond scale, and all that data is being processed on state of the art FPGAs and GPUs. We had to build this whole stack ourselves out of stuff that’s only become available in the last few years,” said Palitsch.

The closed-loop system with real-time monitoring mitigates the quality issues while still allowing speedy printing of complex geometries. And by operating as a printing service, they keep the business model simple.

But making that part of the system work required the second tech breakthrough: a machine-learning model fast enough and expert enough to actually perform that monitoring.

“Erik and TJ lived this and reached the same conclusions, that this industry required a level of compute and sensors that no one had ever deployed before,” said Lappas.

“To properly understand how to control the process, we needed datasets working at timescales that no one had. So we started building a state of the art telemetry system, a platform that would collect curated, controlled, almost self-labeled datasets.”

This data allowed them to bootstrap a model to generate more data for a better model, and so on.

But then they ran into the necessity of speed.

“There’s a lot we have in common with generative models, and a lot we don’t. But one thing that’s absolutely different is the latency,” Lappas explained. “Our inference needs to happen in microseconds so that we can close the loop on these processes.” With no off-the-shelf solution available for the data or the compute, they had to build the GPU/FPGA “AI on steroids” combo from scratch.

A consequential side effect: Freeform is “building the largest metal additive dataset in the world — that’s why companies like Boeing are coming to us,” said Palitsch. “We have this fundamental, core data collection and processing ability no one else has.”

Add that to the fundamental benefits of printing-based manufacturing, like the agility and versatility of factories, and it makes a pretty compelling business case.

Boeing’s AE Ventures and Nvidia invested a total of $14 million, though they declined to break that down further. Each company’s investment comes with perks: Nvidia gives them access to H100s and other compute hardware, while Boeing will shepherd them through the supplier qualification process and likely buy a bunch of parts. (Freeform will also join Nvidia’s Inception startup program.)

Palitsch said they have customers in the aerospace, automotive, industrial, and energy sectors, “the whole nine.” They declined to put any on the record, but did mention they’re making everything from rocket engine components to exhaust parts for Formula 1 cars. They plan to use the money to scale up, build out their next generation of (much faster) printers, and hire up to around 55 people total over the next year.

He admitted that their approach has taken time to grow from theory to reality, but that their methodical, technical approach is also what enabled their success.

“It was a slow transition,” Palitch said. “But I look back at it… with six people, we built, from scratch, the fastest laser melting platform on the planet, and the hardware and software for it. We did things people said you couldn’t do.”

T-Mobile and Verizon have been offering free network trials for a couple of years at this point; now, AT&T has finally introduced a trial program of its own. It’s a no-commitment way to give the AT&T network a try while still holding on to your current carrier, number, and device. Pretty cool! But you’ll need an unlocked phone, which might disqualify a lot of people who are still paying off their current device — though the FCC is trying to do something about that.

AT&T calls its program Try AT&T, and at the moment, it’s iOS only; the carrier’s blog post states that Android support will be introduced in 2025. The trial makes use of eSIM, which allows you to use a secondary line on your phone without ditching your primary number. Likewise, you’ll need an eSIM-compatible device — iPhone XR or newer — to take part.

There’s no credit card or commitment required, you just need to head to the Try AT&T website or download the myAT&T app to get started. The program runs for 30 days and includes 100GB of data plus 25GB of hotspot data. Oh, and you can’t be a current AT&T customer, but that one seems obvious.

To take advantage of any of these programs, you’ll need one important thing: an unlocked phone. If your phone is financed through a carrier installment plan then it might be locked to your current carrier. T-Mobile and AT&T won’t unlock a phone until it’s paid off; only Verizon will unlock a phone with an outstanding balance. It’s confusing at the very least, but the FCC introduced a proposal this year to simplify things by requiring all carriers to automatically unlock a device 60 days after it’s been activated. That proposal is still a long way from becoming law, but if that does happen, then comparison shopping between carriers could become a lot easier.

Spotify continues to be one of the best music streaming services around thanks to personalized features like Daylists – and it isn’t stopping there. It’s just rolled out a new beta feature that lets you create custom playlist art to make your creations look just as good as they sound. In other words, it’s Spotify meets Canva.

The new ‘Create Cover Art’ feature, which is available in English in 65 regions, is a new in-app integration that gives you the opportunity to express your knack for graphic design as well as playlist curation.

Combining the basic elements of a typical graphic design app, Create Cover Art lets you design a custom playlist cover using an array of stickers, background colors, text, and your own images to add a pop of your own personal flair. Whether you’re creating a playlist from scratch or want to spruce up an older one, Create Cover Art is available for both kinds.

As part of Spotify’s new feature launch, the service has partnered with a variety of artists who are known for creating their own playlists on Spotify such as Arlo Parks, Jamie xx, and Clairo. Moreover, Spotify has also been working with visual creatives as well as musicians which includes Imogene, the mastermind behind the now iconic ‘brat green’ cover for Charli xcx’s latest record Brat.

We know there are thousands of planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets. And scientists are pretty sure that many of these planets must also host moons, called exomoons. But because moons are so tiny and dim compared to planets and stars, there has never been a confirmed discovery of an exomoon. Now, though, scientists have uncovered evidence of an exomoon, and it appears to be a hellish and volcanic place.

The possible moon is in orbit around WASP-49 b, a gas giant located over 600 light-years away that orbits its star so closely that a year there lasts just 2.8 days. The evidence for the moon comes in the form of a cloud of sodium that appears to be moving slightly differently from the planet, suggesting it could be linked to its own body.

The presence of sodium is similar to what is seen at Jupiter’s moon Io, which is covered in hundreds of volcanoes and is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. These volcanoes are constantly erupting and spewing out material including sulfur dioxide, sodium, potassium, and other gases, which can be thrown out for hundreds of miles and can form huge clouds that are bigger even than Jupiter.

When researchers used the Very Large Telescope to observe the WASP-49 system, they found a comparable-looking cloud of sulfur, which is why they think there might be a volcanic moon there.

“We think this is a really critical piece of evidence,” said lead researcher Apurva Oza of the California Institute of Technology in a statement. “The cloud is moving in the opposite direction that physics tells us it should be going if it were part of the planet’s atmosphere.”

Another piece of evidence for the existence of a moon is that while both the planet and its star do have small amounts of sodium, there isn’t enough present to explain the size of the cloud.

“The evidence is very compelling that something other than the planet and star are producing this cloud,” said fellow researcher Rosaly Lopes of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Detecting an exomoon would be quite extraordinary, and because of Io, we know that a volcanic exomoon is possible.”

The dramatic nature of this moon, however, should it exist, will be its undoing. Io is heated internally due to the enormous gravitational forces of Jupiter, which is what keeps powering its volcanoes. But this exomoon is throwing out so much material and must be under such gravitational strain that the researchers think it will eventually disintegrate.

“If there really is a moon there, it will have a very destructive ending,” said Oza.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Right now Best Buy is having a great deal on the TCL Q7 TV that you don’t want to miss if you’re looking to upgrade your old TV. The TCL Q7 is usually available at $799.99 if you find it at the full retail price. However, for the rest of the day, Best Buy has it on sale for only $599.99.

This deal is only good for another 10 hours so if you’re considering buying a new TV and this one meets your needs, you’ll have to act fast. We’ve tracked the price of this TV to a little bit lower before so this isn’t the lowest price for the TCL Q7, but today’s Best Buy discount is pretty close, as it was only a few dollars less within the last 6 months. Making today’s price a really good deal still.

Now this is a 65-inch TV and that’s plenty big to super-size your entertainment. There are a lot of really great features on this TV too. For starters, it’s a pretty decent opinion for gamers. With a 65-inch panel that’s also using QLED technology, it has a 120Hz refresh rate. If you’re playing games on PS5 or Xbox Series X, then you’ll be able to take advantage of those 120 frames per second in games that support that refresh rate.

There’s an Auto Game Mode as well for the lowest possible lag while playing. Outside of games, this is a Google TV so that means Play Store access. With the Play Store at your fingertips on the TV, you can easily stream all of your favorite content. Including movies and shows on Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney Plus, and more.

Buy at Best Buy