Qualcomm makes its AI models available to app developers

When Qualcomm formally introduced its Snapdragon X Elite platforms at Computex earlier this month, the company almost solely focused on the AI capabilities of these system-on-chips and only briefly touched upon CPU and GPU. But to take advantage of Qualcomm's Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), one needs AI software that can use it.

Today, Qualcomm developed, optimized, and validated its AI models for its 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU. The models are available at the company's AI Hub to registered software developers who can use already trained models to build their artificial intelligence-enabled applications.

"Qualcomm has made compute models on Qualcomm AI Hub available to everyone," a statement by Qualcomm reads. "Sign up today to immediately run, download, and deploy optimized #AI models on Snapdragon X Elite devices."

The Qualcomm AI Hub contains various AI models optimized for deployment on edge devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and generative AI. Also, the hub provides tools and documentation for deploying AI models in applications such as vision, audio, and speech easily to make development as smooth as possible.

To further simplify things, developers can filter models by tags such as 'backbone, 'foundation,' 'quantized,' and 'real-time.' The site also includes detailed examples and code snippets for deploying and running AI models on devices based on the Snapdragon X Elite processor family.

By making its trained AI models optimized for 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU, Qualcomm ensures that over time, hopefully within a year, there will be a host of AI-enabled applications that can take advantage of its Snapdragon X Elite, which will catalyze demand for PCs based on Qualcomm's SoCs.

In fact, part of the reason Qualcomm focused its Snapdragon X Elite announcement on AI and not on its premium CPU and GPU is that it wanted to attract software developers' attention to what it thinks is the killer feature of 2024 PCs.

In addition, by making its models optimized for particular hardware available, Qualcomm also ensures that AI programs will run best on its Snapdragon X Elite platforms, which will give it a competitive edge against AMD and Intel, who are also about to roll out their new CPUs with high-performance NPUs for AI PCs.