Qualcomm has introduced a handful of new processors over the past six months, catering to computers, smartphones, and more. At Qualcomm AI Day 2019, the firm took time to not only discuss all things AI but also launched its new mid-tier chipsets, along with its first silicon dedicated to artificial intelligence, the Cloud AI 100.
According to Qualcomm, the new accelerator will "raise the bar for AI inference processing relative to any combination of CPUs, GPUs, and/or FPGAs used in today"s data centers". With a new piece of hardware also come new tools, which the firm will be providing to developers so that they can take full advantage of the chip when it comes to cloud-to-edge AI solutions.
In terms of the actual hardware, Cloud AI 100 offers:
- More than 10x performance per watt over the industry’s most advanced AI inference solutions deployed today
- An all new, highly efficient chip specifically designed for processing AI inference workloads
- 7nm process node bringing further performance and power advantages
- Available support for industry leading software stacks, including PyTorch, Glow, TensorFlow, Keras, and ONNX
Naturally, we should see many companies take an interest in this new technology by Qualcomm, and the company is promising to begin sampling the chip to customers in the second half of 2019.
Source: Qualcomm