by Angela Guess

According to a recent press release out of the company, “Qualcomm Technologies… announced today 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 release goes on, “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.”

It continues, “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 videos.”

Read more at qualcomm.com.

Photo credit: Qualcomm