Apple has formed an alliance with it to develop mobile phone processors and embed them into the field of artificial intelligence. But this year, Google released its Tensor chip, providing a platform for Pixel6 to showcase the company's vision in the smartphone field. The massive entry of technology giants into the chip market means that Qualcomm, once a leader in the smartphone industry, will face unprecedented competition. So this year, the chip manufacturer heavily relies on artificial intelligence to give its new processor Snapdragon 8Gen1 more personality. Currently, Apple is developing the seventh generation Qualcomm AI computing engine, which is four times faster than the previous generation. The chip manufacturer claims that this new unit is more powerful because it has twice the shared memory and twice the tensor accelerator for AI related operations. In addition, the efficiency of the battery is 2.8 times that of this year's flagship Snapdragon 888 processor. In addition, a brand new third-generation sensor is also provided, which can provide ultra-low power speech and connectivity experience. Now that we know the AI requirements for the new chip, let's take a look at what it means for phone manufacturers, developers, and consumers.

What will new AI devices do?

Vinesh Sukumar is the director of Qualcomm AI/ML product management, and he said that the new AI department can easily handle more workload. A demonstration program was jointly developed by Arcsoft and video imaging company Arcsoft. A prototype phone based on Snapdragon 8Gen1 can perform facial recognition and facial shot shooting. Sukumar said that this new technology allows software to detect more than 20 facial features, so even in poor angles or small field of view, manufacturers can apply the effect. This new sensor center enables the chip to provide a long-term online experience for facial and object detection at low power consumption. The sensing center has also added a 'Always Secure' module, enabling applications to handle financial transactions in a more secure manner.

Why does Qualcomm collaborate with enterprises and experience different experiences?

So far, Qualcomm chips have often provided mobile phone manufacturers with canvases to draw on their own. Although this possibility still exists, this year, this company is collaborating with many companies to provide more ways for different artificial intelligence experiences. Firstly, in order to enhance the camera experience, including captivating black and white photos and shot effects, Qualcomm is collaborating with German imaging company Leica. Previously, it had partnerships with manufacturers such as Huawei and Xiaomi. However, there are few chip manufacturers and camera manufacturers collaborating. Sukumar stated that camera manufacturer Leica is an important partner in the development of artificial intelligence to capture high-quality and high-density images. This technology will improve the dynamic range and clarity of images, he said. Qualcomm has also collaborated with the health organization Asante to showcase a device that can record your voice for 30 seconds, detect your stress level, asthma condition, and even COVID-19. This situation is not entirely new: Israeli startup Vocalis has achieved similar success through applications, but in Qualcomm's case, all processing is done locally to ensure the integrity of user privacy. HuggingFace is one of the most important partners, a startup dedicated to language based machine learning models. Intel has showcased an intelligent assistant that utilizes sentiment analysis to classify the most important notifications. In addition, you can also view the notification summary based on the priority of the notification.

This assistant can also answer some questions, such as' Where is my dinner? 'and' When will I leave? ' All of this reminds me of Google Assistant. However, Jeff Gehlhaar, Vice President of Qualcomm and Head of AI Software, told me that such collaboration will result in a wider range of use case combinations. If there is an assistant with better features than Google Assistant, then bring it to Qualcomm.

What are the benefits for developers?

Apple said this year that it has introduced support for precise mixed instructions in the SDK, so developers can make their AI models run faster without too much memory. Nevertheless, the biggest change is the introduction of neural structure search into Qualcomm chips (NAS). NAS enables data scientists to optimize specific hardware models without manual training. They can also limit the size or other parameters of the model based on use cases. Chip manufacturers are collaborating with Google Cloud to provide support for NAS products. Qualcomm will use the Google VertexAI solution to store machine learning, so developers can easily train their chip models. This collaboration will enable developers to not only adjust their models on mobile devices, but also adapt to Qualcomm's XR, IoT, and automotive solutions. Competing with Apple, Samsung, and Google. Apple has already used its own chip on the iPhone, while Samsung has mixed its own Exynos processor and Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor on its own device.

Google has abandoned Qualcomm for the first time this year, and there is no doubt that the competition in the chip market has become intense. This American chip giant needs to prove that its processors can be as powerful or even stronger as those of Apple, Samsung, and Google. In order to achieve this goal, it began to focus on artificial intelligence. Surprisingly, companies like OnePlus, Samsung, or Xiaomi using Qualcomm's new devices have given us an unprecedented AI experience on iPhones or Pixels. The competition starts!