There are quite a few companies working hard to get artificial intelligence up and running on your smartphone. Some companies are designing new chips that are much better at running neural networks. Others are working to reduce the computational demands of artificial intelligence so that it can run on existing silicon. Qualcomm is opting for the latter right now. The company has announced today that its Neural Processing Engine is now available to any and all developers.
Qualcomm’s Neural Processing Engine is a software development kit that enables developers to optimize their apps to run artificial intelligence apps on the company’s existing Snapdragon 600 and 800 series processors. There are quite a few devices out there powered by these processors, mind you, given that Qualcomm’s ships account for more than 40 percent of the mobile market.
Qualcomm unveiled the Neural Processing Engine last year and it has been working with select partners on the SDK since then. The company today announced that the Neural Processing Engine is now available to all developers.
Facebook was one of the first companies to integrate Qualcomm’s SDK to bring AI features to its app. The SDK has enabled the Facebook mobile app to speed up augmented reality filters. Qualcomm says that once Facebook switched to its Neural Processing Engine, the filters load five times faster than the generic CPU implementation.
Companies like Microsoft, Graphcore, and ARM are designing new chips for artificial intelligence. Being one of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, that’s an objective that Qualcomm also has, but the company has now confirmed that it’s going to be a while before we see custom artificial intelligence chips from Qualcomm.
Filed in . Read more about Artificial Intelligence and Qualcomm. Source: qualcomm