Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Accelerators Target Edge And Datacenter Markets With Up To 400 TOPS Performance
Last year, Qualcomm announced their Cloud AI 100 platform to provide low-power high-performance AI inference acceleration. Now, these devices are coming to fruition in a variety of form factors for the data center and the individual user.
AI inferencing is an important step in developing AI and utilizing it effectively. Inferencing in general is used in many technologies. AI inferencing, as the name states, is a way for AI to “infer” things about what it is trained on. Basically, AI can condense what it knows, reduce the number of steps to figure something out, and infer from there. This optimizes the AI and how it runs, making it so you do not need as strong of hardware to complete operations.
Based on Qualcomm’s data, these new Cloud AI 100 chips represent a huge leap forward in performance, and will be available for datacenter, cloud edge, edge appliance and 5G infrastructure segments. In both power and performance metrics, Qualcomm is claiming that it is superior to the competition. Entry-level Dual M.2 solutions with a 15W TDP will peak at 70 TOPS. However, Qualcomm claims the AI 100 “is designed to offer cutting-edge AI inference efficiency based on performance-per-watt with capability to process up to 400 trillion operations per second (TOPS)” in its high-end PCIe configurations. The AI 100 chip is built with a 7nm process and is designed from the ground up. This leap forward is upwards of 10x a GPU’s capabilities with inferencing, making is rather impressive.
This sort of AI power will not be exclusive to the data center either. Qualcomm will also be offering a Cloud AI 100 Edge Development Kit, which is an all-in-one system solution for AI inferencing, video processing, and 5G connectivity. Onboard, it will have the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator, a Snapdragon 865 and a Snapdragon X55 5G modem. Overall, Qualcomm says this is the “one-stop-shop with AI inferencing, host processor, and 5G connectivity.”
This is an exciting time to be watching AI and processing develop. With the generational improvements in processing performance, especially with the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 platform, AI should likewise improve leading to advances across multiple sectors.
