Arm Throws Their Axe Into The AI Ocean With Project Trillium

Inference will increasingly take place in apps on smartphones and other "edge" devices. While most phones have chips that can process rudimentary neural nets, additional performance beyond the CPU and GPU is needed for images and language processing. As a result, Huawei's latest Kirin 970 has what it calls a Neural Processing Unit, I believe supplied by Tensilica LLC. The iPhone X has the A11X Bionic chip with a custom silicon block for neural network processing to enable face detection and portrait photography with promises to do more in the future. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 accelerates TensorFlow, Caffe, Caffe2, MxNet and Android NNAPI across its CPU, GPU, and most importantly, its DSP.