Qualcomm has announced an update to the Qualcomm S3 Gen 2 Sound platform portfolio, which is optimised for gaming. Latency is perhaps the biggest issue that is holding back widespread adoption of Bluetooth for gaming, many vendors continue to rely on proprietary RF to ensure latency is minimised. SAR Insight has talked about this many times.
The introduction of LE audio promises to reduce the latency of standard Bluetooth connections to as low 20 milliseconds as using LC3 codec (which replaces SBC). However, achieving this in the real world is going to be difficult with different devices, using different chips and antenna designs.
The Snapdragon Sound proposition is that you have much tighter control over the connection with a Qualcomm chip in both the sink and source device. Therefore much lower latencies are achievable, stated as <20ms.
This latest announcement introduces Snapdragon Sound to dongles, which can then extend the end to end connection, to a device that doesn’t have a Qualcomm chip. For example a dongle can be inserted in a PC or a smartphone (using USB-C) which can then connect to a Snapdragon Sound enabled headset. This opens up low latency to a much wider audience.
