Samsung's new flagship chip Exynos 2700 surpassed Qualcomm's flagship chip in internal test scores, showing strong performance.
Qualcomm engineer Khem Raj questioned the suitability of Linux LTS releases in the generative AI era at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague, arguing that AI coding agents are accelerating patch submissions and adding burden to maintainers. He suggested considering rolling updates and using generative AI tools to assist LTS maintenance.
On Monday, October 5, Qualcomm and Arm appeared in the U.S. District Court in Delaware for a five-day jury trial. Qualcomm accused Arm of withholding contractually required chip testing tools and leaking to the media a threat to terminate a key licensing agreement in 2024, harming Qualcomm's chip deal with Meta. Qualcomm sought to suspend billions of dollars in royalty payments for up to five years. Arm said Meta had shifted to AI glasses, causing no losses. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon testified.
Signal65 released a test report showing Qualcomm's 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite (X2E-88-100) ahead of Intel's Core Ultra 7 358H in Geekbench 7 multi-core, single-core, and UL Procyon AI tests, with a 31% multi-core lead and about 31% lead in AI CV tests. It also offered longer battery life in local video and Chrome browsing, while Intel led in office productivity battery life with 17.4 hours versus 14.3 hours.
On September 28, Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm's mobile business, said Qualcomm is evaluating Samsung Electronics' 2nm wafer foundry process for potential use in next-generation application processors. No specific products or mass production plans have been confirmed, and the evaluation is still at an early stage.
At the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm's Chris Lattner introduced the Modular platform to let the same AI software run across GPUs, NPUs and data center ASICs, enabling flexible switching between on-device and cloud execution. He said AI competition is shifting from chips to ecosystems, highlighted Mojo's combination of ease of use and system-level performance, announced Microsoft's native Windows support for Mojo, and said Modular's software platform will join the Snapdragon portfolio.
At the 2026 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm and PrismML ran a 2-billion-parameter 1-bit quantized Bonsai vision model locally on the Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 smart glasses platform.
At Connect, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the next-generation Meta VR Glasses, which look like oversized sunglasses and come with an external compute and power pod. The device features Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite (XR2 Gen 3) processor, a 5K 120Hz micro-OLED display, six external cameras, four eye-tracking cameras, and hand-gesture support. It will cost $1,300 and launch in Spring 2027, alongside more than 75 hand-powered games.
On September 23, Qualcomm announced an agreement to acquire robotics software company PickNik, subject to customary closing conditions. PickNik maintains MoveIt, an open-source robot manipulation framework based on ROS widely used in industrial automation, service robotics, and physical AI. After the acquisition, MoveIt will remain open-source and support third-party hardware platforms, while integration with Qualcomm's Dragonwing robotics platform will be strengthened; the companies also plan to pair MoveIt with the Arduino VENTUNO Q board to lower robotics development barriers.
On September 24, Qualcomm unveiled the second-generation Snapdragon Audio Platform at the 2026 Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, describing it as its first audio platform to combine premium audio, voice technology, on-device intelligence, and connectivity. The platform integrates Snapdragon Sound, on-device AI, and ultra-low-power Wi-Fi 6E, with peak AI compute of 128 GOPS, double the previous generation, while power consumption is reduced by 40% and size by 30%. It supports multiple form factors including earbuds, over-ear headphones, and audio glasses.