During its first AI Day conference in San Francisco, Qualcomm unveiled its Cloud AI 100 Family of accelerators. According to the company, this next generation of computing processors will be exclusively made for AI inference processing.
Keith Kressin, Senior Vice President of Qualcomm’s Product Management, said:
“It’s a whole new signal processor that we designed specifically for AI inference processing. [We’re not] just reusing a mobile chip in the datacenter.”
Qualcomm claims that the Cloud AI 100 family is designed for the AI market and will be backed by the company’s biggest software stack. The next-gen AI inference accelerators will be available next year and as part of Qualcomm’s push to dominate the market.
Samples of the products will reportedly be released later this year. Many experts commented that its quite early to make such an announcement but, it may be Qualcomm’s way of letting its rivals, NVIDIA and Intel, know that it is heading in a different direction.
The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Family of Accelerators
With the Cloud AI 100 Family, Qualcomm is basically targeting the data center market. The inference accelerators will come in different form factors and TPDs needed by data center operators for maximum performance.
Qualcomm wants to dominate the data center market, and not just by offering the most reliable inference accelerators. The company also promises to deliver a far higher performance than current GPUs and FPGAs.
Qualcomm has not given out the actual architectural details of the Cloud AI 100 Family. However, the tech company was able to provide the following information:
- Parts of the accelerators will be manufactured on a 7 nm process
- It will come in a variety of cards but it is not quite clear whether Qualcomm is designing more than one processor
- The Cloud AI 100 Family is a new design; built from the ground up.
The company again made it clear that the new product is an AI inference accelerator and nothing more. It’s not going to be marketed as an AI training accelerator or a GPU.
AI Inference will bring new applications to every aspect of our lives.