Qualcomm has announced Artificial Intelligence Engine to empower on-device AI-enabled user experiences. The good news is that this AI Engine not only supports upcoming Snapdragon processors like Snapdragon 845 and 660 but also Snapdragon 835 and 820.
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), today introduced its Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine, which is comprised of several hardware and software components to accelerate on-device AI-enabled user experiences on select Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ mobile platforms. The AI Engine will be supported on Snapdragon 845, 835, 820 and 660 mobile platforms, with cutting-edge on-device AI processing found in the Snapdragon 845.
This means Nokia 8 is supported too. Qualcomm lists real-time responsiveness, improved privacy, and enhanced reliability as the key benefits of on-device AI. Qualcomm lists following as Key software-centric components of Qualcomm AI Engine:
Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (NPE) software framework is designed to make it easy for developers to choose the optimal Snapdragon core for the desired user experience – Hexagon Vector Processor, Adreno GPU and Kryo CPU – and accelerate their AI user experiences on device . The Snapdragon NPE supports the Tensorflow, Caffe and Caffe2 frameworks, in addition to the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) interchange format, offering developers greater flexibility and choice on multiple Snapdragon platforms and operating systems.
Support for the Android Neural Networks API, first released in Google’s Android Oreo, gives developers access to Snapdragon platforms directly through the Android operating system. Support for Android NN will appear first in Snapdragon 845.
Hexagon Neural Network (NN) library allows developers to run AI algorithms directly on the Hexagon Vector Processor. This provides optimized implementation for the fundamental machine learning blocks and significantly accelerates AI operations such as convolution, pooling and activations.
