AMD and Magic Leap are collaborating on a soc for an unannounced augmented reality device. AMD will provide a custom processor. It is not yet known when the finished product will be released on the market.
Magic Leap and AMD say they are working together on technology that ‘visualizes virtual content and information’ and the soc is part of this.
It’s a very interesting announcement because AMD has actually nothing in this direction so far. We’re talking about absolute low-power solutions that can be found in VR/AR glasses — there is no AMD chip below 10, 12 watts. Some embedded designs from AMD go in this direction, but in the end, they are actually just large chips whose voltage has been lowered, but the clock rate also drops significantly.
With the current products, it is rather unlikely that something like this will ultimately be sufficient for an AR solution and, above all, appropriate.
Magic Leap is currently still working with Nvidia for the Magic Leap One, among others. Those AR glasses are powered by a Parker SoC, a chipset that, according to Nvidia, is mainly intended for autonomously driving vehicles. The processor is equipped with two Denver cores and four Arm Cortex A57 cores. An Nvidia Pascal GPU with 256 CUDA cores provides the graphics processing power.
