Artificial Intelligence In Chips

AI is increasingly finding its way into chipsets, but what effect will it have?

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AI ON CHIPS?

Think of artificial intelligence and you will probably think of robots or clever software backed up by the power of the internet and cloud computing. And you’d be right. But AI tech is also being embedded into the heart of various processors and chipsets, and entering smartphones and headsets.

Take Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 845 mobile chip (see News, Shopper 363): it not only offers gutsy processor and graphics performance, it’s also tuned to run machine-learning algorithms – effectively the clever code behind AI systems – on the chipset.

It uses a combination of chip parts, such as the Adreno GPU and the Hexagon vector processor, to power Qualcomm’s AI engine. This allows smart features such as the processing of voice commands in natural language to work at quite a lick and image recognition to be carried out on a smartphone, without relying on a consistent internet connection.

Having the tech on a widely available chipset gives developers more scope to put smart AI features into their apps and services.

HOW CAN A SINGLE CHIP POWER AI?

That question needs answering in two parts. First, AI systems are trained using machine-learning algorithms to spot patterns in data to answer questions or solve problems rather than follow a hard-coded set of instructions. This training can either be done under the supervision of human experts or left to AI to draw its own conclusions from data sets with or without guidance.