VR Winner
We get a lot of questions concerning who will benefit from the “Metaverse wave”, particularly when it comes to headsets, and that is a hard question to answer considering VR headset development, despite lots of hype about how easy it will be for VR users to spend hours and hours visiting new worlds, playing games with friends, and buying things that do or don’t exist in the real world. This year’s crop of announced but unreleased VR headsets sport a wide range of display types, ranging from LCD to QD?LCD to Mini-LED and Micro-LED, so there is little agreement on just this one aspect of VR. But there is one component, out of all we track, that seems to be the de facto standard in almost all VR headsets.
The chipset that sits in every headset that we are able to disaggregate, going back as far as 2017 seems to be made by Qualcomm (QCOM), starting with Snapdragon 835, a mobile platform produced on the 10nm node, released in late 2016, up to the current Snapdragon VR2, a more specialized chipset designed for AR/VR. It is unusual to see almost any component show up with such regularity in the CE space as competition from at least a few competitive offerings finding their way into devices, but not so in the VR space, where the continued migration to more robust and focused chipset designs has kept all others from breaking into the VR headset space. We have seen VR chipsets from Huawei’s (pvt) HiSilicon (pvt), although not in any product as of yet, and we expect there are development projects underway at Mediatek (2454.TT) and others, but there has been little in the way of real competition for Qualcomm, who continues to upgrade its platform every two+ years. For reference, of the 53 VR headset models released between 2019 and 2022, we have been able to identify 22 chipsets. Of the 22, all were Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets. So far we have seen no other major component in VR headsets come anywhere close to that ratio. More to follow…
The chipset that sits in every headset that we are able to disaggregate, going back as far as 2017 seems to be made by Qualcomm (QCOM), starting with Snapdragon 835, a mobile platform produced on the 10nm node, released in late 2016, up to the current Snapdragon VR2, a more specialized chipset designed for AR/VR. It is unusual to see almost any component show up with such regularity in the CE space as competition from at least a few competitive offerings finding their way into devices, but not so in the VR space, where the continued migration to more robust and focused chipset designs has kept all others from breaking into the VR headset space. We have seen VR chipsets from Huawei’s (pvt) HiSilicon (pvt), although not in any product as of yet, and we expect there are development projects underway at Mediatek (2454.TT) and others, but there has been little in the way of real competition for Qualcomm, who continues to upgrade its platform every two+ years. For reference, of the 53 VR headset models released between 2019 and 2022, we have been able to identify 22 chipsets. Of the 22, all were Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets. So far we have seen no other major component in VR headsets come anywhere close to that ratio. More to follow…
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