New Unified Qualcomm AI Stack Portfolio Revolutionizes Developer Access, Extends AI Leadership

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced Qualcomm® AI Stack portfolio, accelerating the company’s leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) and the Connected Intelligent Edge. Combining and improving its best-in-class AI software offerings, Qualcomm AI Stack is a comprehensive AI solution for OEMs and developers, supporting a wide range of intelligent devices with broad AI software access and compatibility. For the first time, a single AI software portfolio works across Qualcomm Technologies-powered devices, spanning the wide range of Connected Intelligent Edge products – including mobile, automotive, XR, compute, IoT, and cloud platforms.

Qualcomm AI Stack supports different AI frameworks and popular runtimes including TensorFlow, PyTorch and ONNX, developer libraries and services, system software, tools, and compilers so that any AI feature developed for one device can easily be deployed on others.

“This comprehensive Qualcomm AI Stack portfolio is a truly revolutionary step in improving AI development for OEMs and developers and achieving high performance across our product portfolio,” said Ziad Asghar, vice president of product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We’re delighted to extend our one technology roadmap with this new portfolio and expand our leadership in the Connected Intelligent Edge.”

This comprehensive portfolio provides direct access to the Qualcomm® AI Engine and dedicated AI cores on Qualcomm® Cloud AI 100 using Qualcomm® AI Engine direct. As part of the new offering, the Qualcomm AI Engine direct will now scale across every AI accelerator inside a comprehensive range of Qualcomm Technologies products. Qualcomm AI Engine direct is an AI library that delegates and deploys existing models directly to the AI accelerators on Qualcomm Technologies platforms and will now provide OEMs and developers the ability to develop one feature, then move the same model across different products and tiers.

“Qualcomm Technologies continues to deliver advanced AI solutions that make it easier for developers to leverage today’s most powerful AI and ML capabilities,” said Yuan Yu, Distinguished Engineer for AI Frameworks Architecture at Microsoft. “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.”

The Qualcomm AI Stack portfolio will also include a suite of tools, including Qualcomm® AI Model Efficiency Toolkit (AIMET), AI development graphical user interface (GUI), model analyzers to foster enhanced quantization and optimization, and Neural Architecture Search (NAS). As announced at Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021, Qualcomm Technologies and Google Cloud integrated Google Cloud Vertex AI NAS, which enables OEMs and the ecosystem to create, test, and deploy unique and efficient experiences on the edge. The Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK remains a key product for OEMs and developers to run their neural networks on a broad range of Qualcomm Technologies’ products and will continue to receive regular updates and support. This collective will give Qualcomm Technologies a baseline to create domain-specific SDKs to deploy across the Connected Intelligent Edge.