Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC wants to be your future car's brain

Today at CES Qualcomm unveiled its newest SoC family built for cars. The latest addition to the Snapdragon Digital Chassis portfolio is the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC, which supports mixed-criticality workloads on the same hardware.

This means your car's digital cockpit with its infotainment system can run on the same hardware as its autonomous driving feature and the advanced driver assistance systems. This sounds like a small step forward, but could be huge in allowing for easier, more software-based car development in the future.

Of course there are obvious security concerns here, and unsurprisingly Qualcomm goes into a lot of detail about how it's thought it all through - as it should in an official press release introducing something like this.

The Ride Flex architecture enables isolation, freedom from interference, and quality-of-service for specific ADAS functions. There's a dedicated Automotive Safety Integrity Level D (ASIL-D) island too, and the Flex SoC also pre-integrates a software platform that supports multiple operating systems working concurrently.

The Snapdragon Ride Flex is "pre-integrated" with the Snapdragon Ride Vision stack, which "enables highly scalable and safe driver assistance and automated driving experiences using a front camera to meet regulatory requirements, and multi-modal sensors (multiple cameras, radars, lidars and maps) for enhanced perception that creates an environmental model around the vehicle feeding into vehicle control algorithms", according to Qualcomm's press release.

The Ride Flex scales according to the automaker's needs, from entry-level to high-end, allowing for example for integrated instrument clusters with immersive graphics, along with infotainment and gaming displays, and rear seat entertainment screens. The Flex SoC is built to be an ideal in-vehicle central-compute platform powering the next-gen "Software Defined Vehicle" solutions, providing high performance, "heterogenous safe compute with the ability to execute flexible mixed critical cloud-native workloads".

The Snapdragon Ride Flex is sampling now. Production is expected to start in 2024.

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