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Qualcomm Technologies, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), announced the immediate availability of the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Neural Processing Engine (NPE) software development kit (SDK) on Qualcomm Developer Network. The Snapdragon NPE is the first deep learning software framework designed for Snapdragon Mobile Platforms.
The Snapdragon NPE is engineered to provide developers with software tools to accelerate deep neural network workloads on mobile and other edge devices powered by Snapdragon processors. Developers can choose the optimal Snapdragon core for the desired user experience – Qualcomm® Kryo™ CPU, Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU or Qualcomm® Hexagon™ DSP.
The Snapdragon NPE is designed to offer developers in multiple industries, including mobile, automotive, healthcare, security and imaging, the tools they need to deliver on-device neural network-driven user experiences. Developers can take advantage of deep learning user experiences like style transfers and filters (augmented reality), scene detection, facial recognition, natural language understanding, object tracking and avoidance, gesturing, and text recognition to name a few.
Developers have already begun using the Snapdragon NPE to harness the power of Snapdragon for their mobile app experiences. Facebook, for example, announced plans to integrate the Snapdragon NPE into the camera of the Facebook app to accelerate Caffe2-powered AR features. By utilizing the Snapdragon NPE, Facebook can achieve 5x better performance on the Adreno GPU, compared to a generic CPU implementation. The result is a more fluid, seamless and realistic application of AR features when capturing photos and live vides.
“We developed the Snapdragon NPE SDK to help meet the increasing demand for running deep neural networks efficiently on mobile and other edge devices powered by Snapdragon,” said Gary Brotman, director, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “The Snapdragon NPE was created to give developers the toolsto easily migrate intelligence from the cloud to edge devices, and affords them the flexibility to target the appropriate Snapdragon core with the power and performance profile for a given user experience.”
The Snapdragon NPE, which is compatible with Snapdragon 600 and 800 Series Mobile Platforms, is designed to support common deep learning frameworks such as Caffe, Caffe2 and Tensorflow, and also offers support for custom layers. The SDK includes runtime software, libraries, APIs, offline model conversion tools, sample code, documentation, and debugging and benchmarking tools.
