Wednesday, 23 October 2019

Report: Samsung To Manufacture Custom Tracking Chip For Facebook AR Glasses

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Samsung Electronics will manufacture custom chips for Facebook’s AR glasses, according to a report from Korean outlet The Electronic Times.

Facebook has repeatedly publicly confirmed that it is working on AR glasses. At Oculus Connect 6 in October however, the company stated that the product was still “a few years out”.

One of the challenges of building AR glasses is battery life, and one of the most battery hungry operations would be the positional tracking and world sending. Back in August, a Facebook blog post stated that tracking on AR glasses would need to be 50 times more power efficient than the Oculus Quest’s.

The Oculus Quest uses the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and a “Silver” core (high efficiency low performance secondary core) on the Snapdragon 835 SoC to perform tracking. While this is more efficient than running solely on the generic CPU, a dedicated chip designed for Insight tracking would have the potential to be an order of magnitude more efficient.

oculus insight illustration

The report was written in Korean, but the English version claims that the Samsung manufactured chip will “collect and process various information that comes into Facebook’s AR glasses”. The wording is unclear, but it does seem to be describing a chip made for tracking.

So such a chip would likely not be a replacement for a Qualcomm SoC with CPU/GPU, but instead an additional chip to perform the specific task of tracking in a much more power efficient manner, to allow for the “all day” battery life needed for AR glasses to be a successful consumer product. This would be similar to how Google Pixel phones contain a standard Qualcomm SoC and a Google-designed “Visual Core” for photography.

It’s important to note that Samsung manufacturing such a chip does not mean that Samsung isn’t working on its own AR glasses to compete with Facebook.

Companies like NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm do not actually manufacture the chips they design. That’s done by semiconductor fabrication plants. The four major plants in the world are TSMC, Samsung Electronics, Intel, and GlobalFoundries. TSMC is the market leader, producing chips for NVIDIA, Apple, and others. However, Samsung is not far behind, with its chip business growing rapidly recently thanks to customers like Qualcomm and NVIDIA. Tesla’s next generation self driving chip will also be manufactured by Samsung.

The report claims that there is a “high chance” that the chip will be manufactured with Samsung’s latest 7nm process, the same used to produce the SoC for the Galaxy Note 10. 7nm is the smallest (and therefore most efficient) node size currently available, although both Samsung and TSMC are working on 5nm for future chips.

But while a dedicated tracking chip would allow for extremely low power usage, the downside would be that the tracking might not be able to be improved over time with firmware updates. When the Oculus Quest and Rift S launched the controller tracking did not work properly when one controlled covered another or the controller was too close to the headset, but this was dramatically improved in a software update. If Facebook does end up using a custom chip, it will have to make sure the tracking is finalized long in advance of production – which could delay AR glasses even further.

The post Report: Samsung To Manufacture Custom Tracking Chip For Facebook AR Glasses appeared first on UploadVR.



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