Volvo, Qualcomm and Google are teaming up to make in-car infotainment more smartphone-like than ever. If Wintel (Windows plus Intel) is the standard combination of software and hardware of the PC era, then Android and Qualcomm (Andcom? Qualdroid?) must be the smartphone equivalent. Volvo is bringing this combination to the upcoming Polestar 3 electric SUV, due sometime in 2022. We also got a sneak peek of what the new interface will look like.
The Volvo Polestar 2 was the first vehicle to run Google’s Android Automotive OS. Unlike Android Auto or Apple CarPlay that runs on your smartphone, Android Automotive OS has a special version of Android pre-installed in the car as the main in-car infotainment OS. Even if you have an iPhone, your car is still running Android.
The Polestar 2 used an x86 chip (Intel Atom A3900), but Volvo is now merging the Qualcomm smartphone chip with its Google smartphone OS. The Polestar 3 will ship with Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon Cockpit Platform Gen 3″and while it sounds unique, it’s actually just a repackaged smartphone chip with a few extra features.
Integrating cars with computer technology is always difficult. The development of a car takes about five years, which may seem almost inconsistent with the pace of development of smartphones and computers. This is still true for the 2022 Polestar 3. The Qualcomm Gen 3 automotive platform was actually announced back in 2019, but platform design wins are only being announced now at CES 2022.
Qualcomm says the Gen 3 automotive platform is based on the Snapdragon 820 SoC, ARM’s flagship smartphone chip for 2016. You may remember this chip from phones like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Google Pixel 1. The Intel Atom in the Polestar 2 was also from 2016.
Gen 3 may not be the newest chip in the world, but Volvo uses the same hardware and software platform as smartphones. Volvo should now have a very easy and consistent ARM upgrade path thanks to the smartphone development that happens every year. We hope this alignment will lead to faster time to market. Qualcomm already announced the Gen 4 automotive platform at last year’s CES – it just won’t be in a car for a while.
But about the extra features of Gen 3: it has better RF capabilities like Wi-Fi 6, 5G and newer Bluetooth that you couldn’t get on the Snapdragon 820. Car support, especially Android car, also means the need for support for virtualization. Android can run the infotainment system, but something else is needed to run the dashboard display behind the steering wheel.
According to security rules, a sensor cluster cannot run Android. Android is not a real-time OS, which means it can lag if the processor is too slow, and it’s not allowed for critical driving components like the speedometer. The solution is to force the Snapdragon 820 to run two OSes via virtualization, with Android running the central infotainment screen and some other OS running the sensor cluster display. Android can still send a UI overlay to the sensor cluster for things like multimedia and Google Maps information, but the speed is not capped.
The resurrection of the Snapdragon 820 for a modern product is an interesting proposition for Qualcomm. When it comes to smartphones, support for Qualcomm products is often cited as a major hurdle to the longevity of Android phones. The Snapdragon 820 was supposed to support roughly three major versions of Android, i.e. Android 6, 7, and 8. Qualcomm ended support sometime in 2019, just when the third-generation Snapdragon 820-based automotive chip was announced.
So while Qualcomm would kill your phone, it looks like Android development for this chip never stopped. The Polestar 3 will likely start with Android 11 or 12 and support should continue for years, though the company doesn’t want to offload that job to smartphones.
Today, Qualcomm has a public phone chip support schedule of three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates. Asked if there was a similar support plan for cars, Qualcomm said it would support car chips longer than phone chips, but the company didn’t provide details.
Putting a smartphone chip in a car gives Qualcomm a quick way to get into the market, as phones are currently its biggest market. But the solution is not perfect. ICs for smartphones fully comply with the size and power limitations of a smartphone, which is not the case in a car. The car is big, the whole floor in it is a battery. Cooling may be excessive.
Qualcomm is facing the same problem that many companies in the industry are facing: the largest ARM chips are still mostly used only for smartphones. Apple is setting the trend by bringing ARM to desktops and laptops, but it can do so because it has its own chip design division. Most other companies don’t.
Qualcomm is working on this, and the company plans to start developing more powerful ARM chips for laptops and cars in the future.