Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 Announced

In addition to the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips, Qualcomm also announced their new Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 platform for headsets and wearables.

This new chip is Qualcomm’s premium platform, replacing their previews top tier, the Snapdragon S7 Sound Gen 1. The chip is touted as “The First Premium Audio Platform for Personal AI”, with Qualcomm claiming “up to 70% of users want advanced AI capabilities in their wearable devices”.

But do they? Such a percentage seems rather high, considering the backlash AI is receiving right now. I looked into the report from Qualcomm, and to make a long story short, the survey has severe sampling bias, and one of the questions asking about features, did not even have AI in the top 10 responses.

Lower Power, Smaller Size, and lots of AI

The new Gen 2 delivers more AI, with the new eNPU 6, providing two times the AI capability compared to the previous S7 sound gen 1, which in itself was a new architecture, with almost 100x more on device AI than prior generations. Reading the press release, it seems that Qualcomm has gone all in on AI, with almost 4/5th of the press release AI-focused.

According to Qualcomm, the power consumption is up to 40% lower than the S7 sound gen 1. The key words are “up to”, as Qualcomm themselves state that actual power savings may be less. The average power consumption on the product pages is the same for Gen 1 and Gen 2, 3mA and 4mA. On the S7 Sound gen 1 product page the figures are broken down as 3mA for base consumption, and 4mA for music streaming. I would imagine these figures are for ideal controlled conditions, with higher values in a production model.

The major addition to the new platform is the support for Bluetooth High Data Throughput (HDT) and Bluetooth 7.0. But wait, none of these have been finalized by Bluetooth SIG, so how is Qualcomm able to claim support? Technically they cannot, and the superscript beside Bluetooth 7.0 reveals the support as “capable”.

The main CPU is an ARM M55 clocked at 300 MHz, with 3 main audio DSPs, and one low latency DSP for ANC and personal sound amplification.

• Main DSP ARM M55 500 MHz
• 2 Hi-Fi 5s offload DSP 500 MHz
• Hi-Fi 3 Low Latency DSP 250 MHz

This is seems like an impressive amount of DSPs in such a small chip. How small you ask? Well up to 30% smaller footprint than the Snapdragon S7 Sound gen 1. There is that “up to” wording. Sneaky. There are area figures or 31.185 mm² and 44.2225 mm² but both are labelled as Sound Elite Gen 2, so this has to be an error. I suspected the larger area is the gen 1. I contacted Qualcomm Media for clarification, but have yet to receive a reply.

I looked up the size of the chip, specifically the QCC7228, and I found dimensions of 6.85 x 4.85 mm, which is not even close to 44.2225 mm². The annotation does mention a “combined SoC area”. so perhaps this is more than just the chip. I was able to find the chip in a FCC filing in the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro FCC teardown, and the dimensions were in line with 6.85 x 4.85 mm from the datasheet.

Regardless, a footprint decrease of 20-30% is significant, and this would allow manufacturers to either decrease the size of the earbuds, add a larger battery, or a balance of the two. I am looking forward to teardowns of devices with Gen 2 to find how out how much the chip size was actually reduced.

The Gen chip integrates micro-power Wi-Fi 6E with support for 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands. I believe the previous generation only supported regular Wi-Fi and not 6 GHz, so a definite improvement.

Qualcomm announced XPAN back in late 2023, but adoption of the tech has been slow. The Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro WI-Fi has XPAN support, but I cannot seem to find any additional headsets with XPAN. One major hurdle is the requirement of a top end premium Snapdragon chipset in the phone to take advantage of tech. There are a lot of flagship smartphones with these SoCs on the market, but still not enough of an incentive for headset manufacturers to adopt XPAN.

While searching for details on XPAN, I discovered this photo on the XPAN site, of a familiar looking headset.

Obviously this is a Sony WH-1000XM5 with the Sony logo photoshopped out. I wonder if Sony knows Qualcomm is using their Mediatek powered headset on an XPAN site. If they did not, they do now. This does raise a question, could or should Sony go back to Qualcomm for their Bluetooth chips?

Aside from XPAN, there is support for aptX, aptX Lossless, aptX Voice, and aptX Adaptive.

Neither the press release or Sound Elite Gen 2 product page has any model numbers for the new platform, or when any new products will be available.

Airoha vs Qualcomm

How does Airoha’s AB1595 compare to the new Sound Elite Gen 2? Both chips are AI-oriented, but I suspect the Qualcomm is superior when it comes to AI and AI processing.

	Qualcomm Sound Elite Gen 2	Airoha AB1595
CPU	ARM Cortex-M55 – 300 MHz	ARM Cortex-M33F – 240 MHz
DSP	main DSP ARM M55 – 500 MHz 2 x Hi-Fi 5s offload DSP – 500 MHz Hi-Fi 3 Low Latency DSP – 250 MHz.	2 x Hi-Fi 5s DSP – 480 MHz
Other		AiroHAP Audio Processor

As I mentioned earlier, the Qualcomm chip has a lot of DSPs in it, but having more DSPs is not necessarily better, especially if they are not utilized efficiently.

When it comes to AI, Qualcomm features their new eNPU 6, which can provide up to 128 GOPS of AI acceleration. For comparison the Airoha AB1595 uses a dedicated NPU from Cadence, the NNE110. Big thanks to the team from Airoha, who kindly provided me with this information. While they did not reveal the GOPS to me, this article on Semi-wiki states the NNE110 can range from 64 to 256 GOPS.

Finally the Airoha AB1595 includes the ​AiroHAP Audio Processor, which is a proprietary processor used to further enhance overall audio processing and rendering capabilities.  There is very little information on this processor, so perhaps it acts like another DSP.

Both the Qualcomm and Airoha chips support HDT, with Airoha using a proprietary solution according to this article, but I suspect it is some form of the HDT spec we can expect later this year once it is finalized.

Choosing the best chip is rather difficult, as there are no benchmarks to test them on, and compare them directly. The Qualcomm chip is a newer chip, and it may have more processing capabilities and AI, but it may not be more efficient than the Airoha chip. The Airoha AB1595 is built on a 12nm node, but we have no details on what node the Qualcomm chip is using right now. I cannot even find any node details for the previous S7 Sound Gen 1 either.

When I first wrote about XPAN back in late 2023, I honestly expected the tech to take off, but that did not happen. Companies have adopted Qualcomm’s Bluetooth platforms in many devices over the past few years, but not XPAN. Could this change with this new generation? I have my doubts.

So I do not think Sony will go back to Qualcomm anytime soon, and will instead keep collaborating with Airoha/Mediatak for their Bluetooth chips.