Qualcomm Inc. today unveiled its new Qualcomm AI Stack portfolio, which it says brings a unified software approach to creating artificial intelligence applications across its products.
Qualcomm AI Stack is said to combine and improve upon the company’s existing AI offerings by providing a more comprehensive AI solution for original equipment manufacturers and developers. It supports a range of intelligent devices with broad AI software, access and compatibility, the company said. It works across multiple Qualcomm-powered connected intelligent edge products, such as automotive, mobile, extended reality, internet of things and cloud platforms.
Previously, Qualcomm Chief Executive Cristiano Amon has said he aims to transform Qualcomm into a “full stack” company that’s able to provide solutions for the intelligent edge. By taking this approach, Qualcomm follows in the footsteps of a number of other semiconductor firms taking a similar approach to help developers accelerate AI integration at the edge.
Qualcomm said the AI Stack portfolio provides developers with direct access to the Qualcomm AI Engine, as well as dedicated access to AI cores on Qualcomm Cloud AI 100. Qualcomm AI Engine is an AI library that’s able to delegate and deploy existing models directly to the AI accelerators on Qualcomm Technologies’ platforms. With it, OEMs and developers gain the ability to develop one feature, then move the same model across different products and tiers, the company explained.
To make life easier, Qualcomm AI Stack supports multiple AI frameworks and popular runtimes, including PyTorch, TensorFlow and ONNX, plus various common developer libraries, services, tools and compilers. Through this extensive support, Qualcomm said it becomes easy to move an AI feature developed on one device to other pieces of hardware.
The move was applauded by Yuan Yu, a distinguished engineer for AI Frameworks Architecture at Microsoft Corp. He said Qualcomm AI Stack will make it much simpler for developers to leverage powerful AI and machine learning capabilities on an array of platforms.
“We’re enthusiastic to bring Qualcomm AI Software technologies to developers in our ecosystems, including the Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows, to offer edge-to-cloud AI capabilities by providing unified, comprehensive AI software that scales from clients to servers,” Yu said.
Qualcomm said the AI Stack portfolio also comes with various other tools, including the Qualcomm AI Model Efficiency Toolkit, a dedicated AI development graphical user interface, model analyzers and Neural Architecture Search.