Artificial intelligence engine in Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform powers on-device AI user experiences in flagship premium-tier smartphones

Qualcomm AI Software and Cloud Ecosystem Expands to Satisfy Increasing Demand for Intelligent and Immersive Real-time Mobile AI Features

Feb 25, 2019 | BARCELONA

At Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), announced that the 4th Generation Qualcomm® Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine is supporting the surge of on-device AI voice, camera, AR user experiences on the majority of recently announced premium-tier smartphone models based on the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 855 Mobile Platform. The Qualcomm AI Engine has helped fuel innovation among a growing number of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent software vendors (ISVs) and cloud companies, resulting in superior development and deployment of seamless and compelling on-device AI-powered features that will delight Android mobile phone consumers in 2019.

Smartphone manufacturers, including Sony and Xiaomi, recently launched flagship smartphones based on Snapdragon 855, all of which take advantage of Qualcomm AI Engine components to accelerate AI features on their devices. Additional AI features include Dual and Single-camera Bokeh, Secure 3D Face Authentication, Scene Detection, Super Resolution, and myriad computational photography enhancements that make shooting photos and videos with higher quality, real-time effects processing easier and more natural for consumers.

“On-device processing enables us to bring Google Lens to users proactively, allowing people to simply point their camera at text, and with a single tap, call a phone number on a takeout menu or send an email right from a flyer,” said Eddie Chung, director of product management for Google Lens. “Through our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, we've pushed the boundaries of what can be done on-device through Qualcomm AI Engine and Android NN API.”

“The volume of Qualcomm Technologies’ mobile OEMs and ecosystem collaborators taking advantage of our 4th gen Qualcomm AI Engine in Snapdragon 855 validates our heterogenous AI product strategy,” said Gary Brotman, senior director of product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “By providing highly optimized on-device AI acceleration and offering a broad suite of software tools and neural network frameworks, Snapdragon 855 is a preferred mobile platform for developers who want to push the boundaries of on-device AI performance and deliver innovative new AI features and applications to flagship smartphones this year.”

Ecosystem Momentum

In December 2018, Qualcomm Technologies announced its 4th generation multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine as a feature of the Snapdragon 855, which offers 3x the AI performance compared to the previous generation mobile platform and more than 2x the AI performance of the closest premium tier Android-based competitor. New to the Qualcomm AI Engine in Snapdragon 855 is the Hexagon Tensor Accelerator (HTA) for dedicated AI processing and four Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX), a doubling of vector processing from our previous generation flagship mobile platform, the combination of which provides a powerful blend of dedicated and programmable AI acceleration.

The roster of Qualcomm Technologies’ AI software collaborators taking advantage of the 4th generation Qualcomm AI Engine continues to expand across multiple domains, providing OEMs with more pre-optimized algorithms powering next-generation on-device AI features including bokeh, real-time video segmentation, super resolution, natural language processing, translation and single-mic noise suppression. Qualcomm Technologies’ AI software collaborators now include:

• Camera: AnyVision, ArcSoft, Face++, Loom.ai, Nalbi, Polarr, Inc., SenseTime, Thundercomm, Uncanny Vision
• Audio/Translation: Youdao, AISpeech, Elevoc, iFlytek
• Gesture: Elliptic Labs, Qeexo
• Augmented Reality: NetEase, SenseTime
• Automotive: Cogent Embedded Technology, Jungo, PathPartner Technologies, ZongMu

Qualcomm Technologies will showcase many of these AI demonstrations at the Qualcomm Booth #E310 in Hall 3 at Mobile World Congress 2019.