Qualcomm Brings AI, Vision Processing to IoT

After surpassing $1 billion in IoT revenue in FY2017, Qualcomm is announcing new product families purpose-built for IoT applications. The company began by announcing a new family of IoT chipsets, the QCS603 and QCS605, along with software and reference designs, all dubbed the Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform. The platform brings the image and artificial intelligence (AI) processing capabilities found on its Snapdragon chipsets for premium smartphones to a wide range of consumer and industrial applications. With the transition from connected devices to intelligent devices, there is a push to bring AI processing from the cloud to the devices we use, commonly referred to as the "edge" or "edge devices" referring to the edge of the network. Bringing AI to the edge reduces cloud and connectivity bandwidth requirements while increasing security and system performance. Vision plus AI processing have become critical elements in autonomous cars and many other applications that require local processing.