Tango runs on the platform (in a way)
No qualification needed. Both Tango smartphones use a Qualcomm SoC. Lenovo's Phab 2 Pro uses the Snapdragon 652, while Asus' Zenfone AR uses Snapdragon 821.
At this point, then, Android XR is as much a Qualcomm joint as it a Google one.
Not really. Google owns the APIs and most of the software stack. You can be pretty sure they've kept the barriers to entry, for other SoC vendors, as low as possible. If Qualcomm is the only hardware platform doing Tango and/or Daydream, it'll be bad news for Google.
The HoloLens runs on an Intel Cherry Trail SoC. (It’s true that it offloads a lot of work to its dedicated HPU, and the Snapdragon platform has no such third chip.)
That was a non-sequitur. Cherry Trail also has no such third chip (and I think you mean
second chip?). Microsoft designed it. All Qualcomm needs to do is provide the PCIe lanes needed to talk to it. On that front, I don't know how their current SoCs fare.
It’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison here, but surely a powerful Snapdragon chip that is uncluttered with telephony can handle similar performance.
Why wouldn't they keep the cell modem, in case people wanted to use cloud apps outside of wifi coverage? I don't believe the Oculus line about how much overhead it adds - just check your battery usage statistics, sometime. On my phone, cell standby is usually pretty far down the list.
According to Microsoft, the x86 Win32 apps run unmodified on Windows 10
I wish you guys would clarify whether you mean 32-bit only, or 32-bit + 64-bit. I would assume the latter, but some readers of that article took it literally to mean only 32-bit.
Qualcomm seems to be a pretty far-sighted company. They were already talking about their Zeroth mobile deep learning platform, back when deep learning was barely a thing. It looks like they did a good job of predicting the onset of AR & VR, as well. I hope it will have been worth their while, but I'm already eager to see others join the fray.
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