Qualcomm

Qualcomm debuts latest flagship Snapdragon chip and a new AI platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in chips, Gadgets, Hardware, Qualcomm, snapdragonNo Comments

It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum and product deluge of CES and MWC. It’s an ideal time to pepper the industry with some timeline news items. Many of the major manufacturers are effectively finished announcing hardware for the year, and things won’t really ramp up for another couple of months. The big news is, naturally, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. That’s the chip that’s going to power a majority of your flagship Android handsets next year — at least until the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 presumably starts rolling out at some point mid-2023. It’s likely not surprising for those who have been following the space for the last several years that Qualcomm is positioning AI/ML as the centerpiece of its latest system on a chip. With the new Hexagon Processor (that’s a Qualcomm trademark, mind) at its center, the new system on a chip promises up to 4.35x gains for things like natural language processing. “This is thanks to the industry’s only Micro Tile Inferencing technique so we can power features like real-time multi-language translation,” the company writes. “In other words, you can speak into a language translator and have it translated into multiple languages running these complex networks.” Computational photography is the other big piece there. The system is able to recognize and segment different aspects of an image before the photo is taken. It uses a portrait as an example — breaking up hair, clothes, the background and a face into different segments. It’s a feature that will no doubt be present in imaging products like Portrait mode, in which depth sensing is important. The first devices with Gen 2 are set to arrive before the end of the year. The list of phone makers signed up for the SoC includes ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU and ZTE. Image Credits: Qualcomm Also of note this week is the arrival of Qualcomm’s new augmented reality chip, the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1. The component is designed to power a new generation of slim AR wearables. It’s a low-power solution that sits across different parts of the glasses in order to better distribute its weight. “We built Snapdragon AR2 to address the unique challenges of headworn AR and provide industry-leading processing, AI and connectivity that can fit inside a stylish form factor,” Qualcomm’s Hugo Swart said in a release. “With the technical and physical requirements for VR/MR and AR diverging, Snapdragon AR2 represents another metaverse-defining platform in our XR portfolio to help our OEM partners revolutionize AR glasses.” The list of manufacturers developing hardware with the platform includes Lenovo, LG, Nreal, OPPO, Pico, QONOQ, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix and Xiaomi.

Microsoft’s Windows Dev Kit 2023 lets developers tap AI processors on laptops • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in AI, Apps, Hardware, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Robotics & AI, WindowsNo Comments

At its Build conference in May, Microsoft debuted Project Volterra, a device powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform designed to let developers explore “AI scenarios” via Qualcomm’s Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit. Today, Volterra — now called Windows Dev Kit 2023 — officially goes on sale, priced at $599 and available from the Microsoft Store in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. Here’s how Microsoft describes it: With Windows Dev Kit 2023, developers will be able to bring their entire app development process onto one compact device, giving them everything they need to build Windows apps for Arm, on Arm. As previously announced, the Windows Dev Kit 2023 contains a dedicated AI processor, called the Hexagon processor, complimented by an Arm-based chip — the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 — both supplied by Qualcomm. It enables developers to build Arm-native and AI-powered apps alongside and with tools such as Visual Studio (version 17.4 runs natively on Arm), .NET 7 (which has Arm-specific performance improvements), VSCode, Microsoft Office and Teams and machine learning frameworks including PyTorch and TensorFlow. Microsoft’s Windows Dev Kit 2023, which packs an Arm processor plus an AI accelerator chip. Image Credits: Microsoft Here’s the full list of specs: 32GB LPDDR4x RAM 512GB fast NVMe Storage Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform RJ45 for ethernet 3 x USB-A ports 2 x USB-C ports Mini DisplayPort (which supports up to three external monitors, including two at 4K 60Hz) Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 6 The Windows Dev Kit 2023 arrives alongside support in Windows for neural processing units (NPU), or dedicated chips tailored for AI- and machine learning-specific workloads. Dedicated AI chips, which speed up AI processing while reducing the impact on battery, have become common in mobile devices like smartphones. But as apps such as AI-powered image upscalers and image generators come into wider use, manufacturers have been adding such chips to their laptops (see Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X and 5G Surface Pro 9). The Windows Dev Kit 2023 taps into the recently released Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows, which provides tools for converting and executing AI models on Snapdragon-based Windows devices in addition to APIs for targeting distinct processor cores with different power and performance profiles. Using it and the Neural Processing SDK, developers can execute, debug and analyze the performance of deep neural networks on Windows devices with Snapdragon hardware as well as integrate the networks into apps and other code. The tooling benefits laptops built on the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 system-on-chip, like the Acer Spin 7 and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. Engineered to compete against Apple’s Arm-based silicon, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3’s AI accelerator can be used to apply AI processing to photos and video. Microsoft and Qualcomm are betting the use cases expand with the launch of the Windows Dev Kit 2023; Microsoft for its part has started to leverage AI accelerators in Windows 11 to power features like background noise removal. Image Credits: Microsoft In a blog post shared with ZebethMedia ahead of today’s announcement, Microsoft notes that developers will “need to install the toolchain as needed for their workloads on Windows Dev Kit 2023” and that some tools and services “may require additional licenses, fees or both.” “More apps, tools, frameworks and packages are being ported to natively target Windows on Arm and will be arriving over the coming months,” the post continues. “In the meantime, thanks to Windows 11’s powerful emulation technology, developers will be able to run many unmodified x64 and x86 apps and tools on their Windows Dev Kit.” It remains to be seen whether the Windows Dev Kit reverses the fortune of Windows on Arm devices, which have largely failed to take off. Historically, they’ve been less powerful than Intel-based devices while suffering from compatibility issues and sky-high pricing (the Surface Pro X cost more than $1,500 at launch). Emulated app performance on the first few Arm-powered Windows devices tended to be poor and certain games wouldn’t launch unless they used a particular graphics library, while drivers for hardware only worked if they were designed for Windows on Arm specifically. The Windows on Arm situation has improved as of late, thanks to more powerful hardware (like the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3) and Microsoft’s App Assurance program to ensure that business and enterprise apps work on Arm. But the ecosystem has a long way to go, still, with Unity — one of the most popular game engines today — only this morning announcing a commitment to allow developers to target Windows on Arm devices to get native performance.

Reliance launches JioBook, its maiden Android-powered laptop • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Android, Gadgets, Hardware, Jio Platforms, Qualcomm, relianceNo Comments

Jio Platforms has quietly launched its first laptop, entering into a new product category as the Indian telecom giant aggressively expands its offerings. The laptop, called JioBook, runs JioOS, a custom Android-based OS that has been “optimized for superior performance” and local languages support. The laptop, manufactured in India, is selling at 15,799 Indian rupees, or $190. The JioBook, which also ships bundled with several Jio apps and Microsoft 365 services, has been in the works for at least two years. The company quietly demonstrated it at Indian Mobile Congress trade show event last month. JioBook’s specifications, as you would have guessed, are not very high-end. It sports a 11.6-inch HD display with a screen resolution of 1366 x 768. It is powered by Qualcomm’s 64-bit, 2GHz octa-core processor and 2GB of RAM. But the laptop ships with an embedded Jio sim card, enabling out of the box support for Jio 4G LTE connectivity. The firm says on its store page that the JioBook features up to 128GB of flash storage and can last up to eight hours on a single a charge. The laptop is the latest of a series of businesses Reliance, the Indian conglomerate and the parent firm of Jio Platforms, has entered in recent years. The firm, led by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, entered the telecom business six years ago and quickly became the top service provider in the country, thanks to the network’s cutrate data and voice tariffs. Jio Platforms, which secured over $20 billion in funding from over 10 investors in 2020 including Meta and Google, has also launched feature phones and smartphones in the past half decade. The company’s JioPhone Next smartphone went on sale last year. Jio Platforms has worked closely with Google to develop a custom Android operating system for the smartphone. The company appears to have ambitious plans with the JioBook. Reuters, which scooped the laptop’s imminent unveiling plan earlier this month, said Reliance plans to sell “hundreds of thousands” of units by March. Jio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.