Qualcomm's AI Models Now Available for App Developers
Qualcomm is opening doors for app developers to use its advanced AI models. These models are designed to work with Qualcomm's Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU). Let's dive into what this means and how it can be useful.
AI Capabilities of Snapdragon X Elite
Earlier this month at Computex, Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon X Elite platforms. While much of the focus was on the AI capabilities of these new system-on-chips, the company also highlighted the performance of their CPU and GPU briefly.
Optimized AI Models for Developers
Qualcomm has created and fine-tuned AI models for their powerful 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU. These models are stored in the company's AI Hub and can be accessed by registered software developers. This means that developers can use these pre-trained models to build their own AI-enabled applications quickly and easily.
What's Inside the Qualcomm AI Hub?
The Qualcomm AI Hub has a variety of AI models. Some of the key types of models include:
- Image Classification: Identifying different objects in images.
- Object Detection: Recognizing and locating objects within images.
- Semantic Segmentation: Understanding the context of different parts of an image.
- Generative AI: Creating new content based on learned patterns.
Tools and documentation are also available in the AI Hub to help developers integrate AI into applications like vision, audio, and speech.
Filtering and Examples
To make things simpler, Qualcomm allows developers to filter models by tags such as 'backbone,' 'foundation,' 'quantized,' and 'real-time.' Detailed examples and code snippets are available to make deploying and running AI models straightforward.
Why Qualcomm is Focusing on AI
By making these AI models optimized for 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU, Qualcomm aims to ensure a wide range of AI-enabled applications will emerge. This will, in turn, boost demand for PCs that run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Part of why Qualcomm highlighted the AI capabilities in their Snapdragon X Elite announcement was to capture the interest of software developers. The goal is to make these models work best on Snapdragon X Elite platforms, giving Qualcomm an edge over competitors like AMD and Intel, who are also gearing up to release high-performance CPUs with NPUs for AI applications.
In summary, Qualcomm's strategic move to make its AI models available to developers is designed to surge interest and usage in their AI capabilities and hardware, preparing the ground for future demand and competitive advantage in the AI space.
