Qualcomm Technologies Inc. today debuted the Dragonwing IQ10, a system-on-chip optimized to power humanoid robots.

The company announced the module at the CES electronics show in Las Vegas alongside several new processors for connected devices and laptops.

According to Qualcomm, the Dragonwing IQ10 can power humanoid robots with more than 20 cameras. It also supports other sensors such as lidar units and radars. Robots can process the data from those sensors by running artificial intelligence models on a neural processing unit built into the Dragonwing IQ10. 

The chip provides 350 dense TOPS of performance for AI workloads, which equals 350 trillion operations per second. That’s more than three times the AI performance of Qualcomm’s previous flagship robot chip. The latter processor, the Dragonwing IQ9, supports large language modes with 13 billion parameters, which means the IQ10 can likely run significantly larger algorithms.

Besides an NPU, the new chip also includes a graphics processing unit and an 18-core central processing unit. It runs sensitive software on an isolated set of circuits called a safety island. Additionally, Qualcomm has included error correction features that enable the chip to automatically fix certain data processing issues.

The Dragonwing IQ10 made its debut alongside another AI-optimized chip called the Dragonwing Q‑7790. According to Qualcomm, it’s designed to power connected systems that process video footage. A warehouse robot, for example, can use it to run vision models that detect and avoid nearby objects.

The Dragonwing Q‑7790 is based on a three-nanometer manufacturing process. It includes an eight-core CPU, a GPU and a cybersecurity accelerator. An AI engine provides 77 TOPS of performance, which is enough to run LLMs with up to 11 billion parameters.

The third addition to Qualcomm’s Dragonwing product family is called the Dragonwing Q‑8750. It’s designed for use in AI-equipped TVs, production line monitoring cameras and other edge devices with limited processing requirements. The chip provides 24 TOPS of inference performance.

At CES today, Qualcomm also debuted a new line of laptop processors called the Snapdragon X2 Plus series. On launch, it comprises four chips made using a performance-optimized version of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s three-nanometer node.

The most capable chip in the series is called the X2P. It features a 10-core CPU that Qualcomm says can provide 35% faster single-core performance than its previous-generation silicon. The X2P also includes a GPU, an NPU with a top speed of 80 TOPS and a 34-megabyte cache.

Qualcomm expects the first Snapdragon X2 Plus laptops to start shipping later this quarter.

Image: Qualcomm