Special Mobile Chips Will Be Coming

In order to speed up the speed of smartphone processing AI tasks, technology companies are carrying out a variety of different attempts. Microsoft and ARM in the design is more suitable for running the neural network chip, Facebook and Google want to reduce the performance of the AI itself. But for the chip manufacturers Qualcomm, their current plan is more simple: the existing chip products to adapt.

Qualcomm has developed a software development kit (SDK) called the Neural Processing Engine to help developers optimize their applications so that they can run AI tasks on the Xiao Long 600 and 800 series processors The That means that if you are developing an application that uses AI (such as image recognition), you can integrate Qualcomm's SDK to run it more quickly on a compatible processor.

The neural processing engine was released by Qualcomm as part of the Zeroth platform (which was subsequently cut as a brand) a year ago. Since September last year, Qualcomm began with a number of partners to develop the SDK, and now, it is finally officially open for everyone to use.

"Any developer who has already invested in deep learning - that is, they have data access and trained AI models - regardless of size, are our target users," Qualcomm AI and the machine learning department are responsible for "It's very easy to use, and we've got all the basics," Gary Brotman said. "You do not have to go to these heavy tasks."

Qualcomm said Facebook will be one of the first manufacturers to integrate the SDK, they are currently using it to accelerate their mobile applications in the enhanced reality filter. By using the neural processing engine, Facebook's filter loading speed increased by 5 times.

As for how developers use this SDK, this will vary according to the content of the work, but its basic task is to assign different tasks to Xiaolong chip different parts. For example, if the developer wants to optimize the life or processing speed, they can extract the computing resources from different parts of the chip, such as CPU, GPU or DST.

The SDK also supports the most popular AI system development architecture, including Caffe, Caffe2 and Google's TensorFlow. Qualcomm said it is also suitable for cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, VR helmets and smart home products, in addition to optimizing AI on mobile electronic parts.

But deploying the architecture that can fit the existing processor is just the beginning. "AI workloads will increase the need for computing performance," Brotman said. In order to meet this demand, technology companies are working on AI to optimize the chip to develop a new architecture design. For example, Microsoft is developing a custom machine learning processor for HoloLens 2, and UK chip maker Graphcore recently raised $ 30 million to develop its own "smart processing unit" for mobile devices.

And for Qualcomm, they will certainly take this strategy in the future, but now is not the time. "For us, adding new content to the chip is a bet, and we're not going to do that easily," Brotman said. "If we can optimize the existing product line, we've done a great job. In the long run, do we need a dedicated neural calculation? The answer is yes, the question is when we should bet.

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Samsung Chip Business Will Surpass Intel

According to the Financial Times reported that the market is expected to end Intel's chip market up to 25 years of the rule, but also in the quarterly profits than its smart phone market in the main rival Apple, all thanks mainly to its simplest one of the needs of the product is high: the memory chip.

From smartphones to cars and "Internet of Things", the increase in storage chip usage leads to undercapral supply, pushing up their prices, and Samsung has become a major beneficiary. At the same time, Intel's main battlefield traditional PC processor market is continuing to shrink.

IBM PC was the rise, so that Intel in 1992, overturned NEC, boarded the top of the global semiconductor market. With Intel and Samsung on Thursday announced their latest quarterly earnings, Intel will dominate the era will end.

For the second quarter, Samsung expects its semiconductor revenue will be up to 15 billion US dollars, more than Intel's expected 14.4 billion US dollars.

"Samsung has a phenomenal performance in the field of memory chips," said Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight in Silicon Valley. "The demand for its memory chips is far greater than the supply, after all, it's a variety of products A very important part. "

IT market research firm Gartner analysts expect global semiconductor revenue this year will be more than 400 billion US dollars for the first time, mainly due to Samsung's dominant memory chip market growth of 52%. "This gives Samsung a great opportunity to take hegemony from Intel this year," said Andrew Norwood, a chip analyst at Gartner.

However, the current storage chip market in the event of a major change, or just at another top of the boom - depression cycle, analysts view different.

"No matter how Samsung is now spending more than Intel, it will probably not last long," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies.

Benefit from the high demand for data storage, the global storage chip industry is clearly in the unprecedented super cycle. This brings huge profits to leading companies such as Samsung and SK Hynix, and they are also struggling to expand capacity to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for networking equipment and data servers.

Due to supply and demand imbalance, storage chip prices in the past year, a full doubled. The chip maker's share price rose by an average of 155% compared to the cyclical bottom they recorded in 2016. SK Hynix said on Tuesday that its net profit in the second quarter reached 2.5 trillion won (about 2.2 billion US dollars), up 763% year on year.

In the booming memory chip market, Samsung is expected to record a record profit, becoming the world's most profitable non-financial companies. In the quarter ended June, its operating profit is expected to reach $ 12.1 billion, more than Apple. Analysts estimate that Apple's earnings for the quarter will be $ 10.5 billion in the quarter, but the quarter is usually the slowest quarter of the iPhone maker.

Samsung's storage chip field of the rule of the seeds in fact nearly 10 years ago had been buried, when the industry cycle turned to oversupply. In 2008, over-expansion of production capacity, coupled with the global financial crisis, forced many suppliers to withdraw from the flash chip market. However, while other manufacturers have retreated, Samsung is the opposite, and expand the input. "They will focus on the memory chip," said Barakari, "it is commendable that they see this as a great opportunity."

At present, Samsung's operating margins from DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) memory chips (typically for PC and data center servers) and NAND flash memory chips are estimated to exceed 60% and 45%, respectively. The company is investing heavily in a range of semiconductor electronic parts, with capital spending estimated at $ 12.5 billion this year, but the recent investments are targeted at NAND chips. This type of chip is mainly used for smart phones, solid state drives and camera memory cards.

"There will be more and more devices and endpoints in the future that need to use memory chips to push up the demand for such chips." Brapp said, "Samsung has a huge scale advantage, so their cost base competencies are significantly more than others Manufacturers. "

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