Qualcomm's latest venture is aiming towards powering smart home cameras. The company recently unveiled a reference design for home monitoring cameras, at its heart is the new Snapdragon 618 processor.
While the Snapdragon 618 is not Qualcomm's most powerful processor, it is has more computing power compared to those currently used in modern home cameras. The processor can even support two cameras at the same time.
The additional computing power of the Snapdragon 618 will enable cameras to work faster than usual. Qualcomm claim that current of cameras relies most of their processing in the cloud. This creates a lag between an event and any alert it might trigger since cameras still have to transfer massive amounts of data into the cloud.
By integrating the Snapdragon 618 into the camera, this allows the camera to locally do all the important image analysis therefore eliminating delay from the event to the alert it wants to trigger.
Qualcomm head for mobile computing Raj Talluri told The Verge, "We've done a lot of work getting cameras and computer vision optimized in the phone space. Typically it's harder in the phone space - a phone has a pinhole camera and is always moving - but now we're bringing that technology into this space where the application is a little different, but the technology we built applies perfectly."
Since Qualcomm only introduced a reference design, it means that the company will not manufacture the cameras itself. Qualcomm is convincing hardware manufacturers to use its pre-made design in constructing one and the company is expecting the first cameras powered by the Snapdragon 618 to be released within the first six months of 2016.
According to Tech News World, Qualcomm's reference design includes a 64-bit bit CPU with dual 1.8-GHz ARM CortexTM-A72 and four 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 cores. It has integrated X8 LTE modem and supports LTE Cat 7 with peak download speeds of up to 300Mbps. Additional connectivity feature includes 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-FI, Ethernet, GPS and Bluetooth Smart 4.1.