Road Map for SOC capable of self-contained VR or AR?

wco81

Legend
Among the articles about the availability of the first VR products, there was speculation that the category wouldn't really take off and represent a potentially disruptive force until those HMDs were truly untethered.

So that implies mobile devices, not being connected to a power-hungry PC or a console with all kinds of wires like the PSVR.

Maybe a truly self-contained VR or AR experience wouldn't even have a single wire between the HMD and the mobile device either. So in addition to having probably a modem to connect to mobile networks, maybe there would have to be a short-range high-bandwidth connection to send video to the HMD as well as to collect input (maybe hand gestures and head-turning for true mobility as opposed to some kind of controllers).

So how long before a mobile SOC can drive HMDs comparable to the PSVR, OR, Vive?
 
The variable is really how complex are the scenes you want to run on it.

Mobile chips of today can already render mobile benchmarks/games at very high framerates and at very high resolutions. So, it's not a particularly big step from any off the shelf mobile part (maybe one per eye) to a mobile HMD. I don't think it'll be long tbh. GPUs scale remarkably well so I'm pretty sure PowerVR & Arm will sell you a GPU capable of doing it right now if approached and I'd be surprised not to see NVidia announce a Tegra focused on it at some stage...

Might be worth mentioning that 10nm process tech and HBM2 are arriving more or less together and are just around the corner. The availability of these two technologies may well be the tipping point into truly high performance mobile graphics at super low power levels. You can build one heck of an efficient, high performance chip at 10nm with a decent silicon area budget!
 
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