Qualcomm Flexes Its AI Muscles and Enables The Edge

When we talk about “Edge Computing,” we are often talking about PCs, but PCs are a tiny part of the edge that will enable the coming AI world. The real volume will be in sensors that give the deployed AIs the ability to sense and interact with the world around us. These sensors increasingly need to be intelligent so that the amount of data aggregation in Cloud AI data centers can be reduced to manageable levels and so that latency doesn’t render large-scale AI deployments and upgrades ineffective.

At embedded world this month, Qualcomm made a huge step by announcing breakthrough Wi-Fi technology and introducing new AI-ready IoT home and industrial platforms.

Let’s talk about that this week.

The Critical Need For Smart Sensors (Including Cameras)

One of the major components of the coming AI wave are digital twins that will be used to create digital clones of real things in the metaverse. These clones can then be used in simulations to assess what is possible, manage remote resources, and to forensically analyze a past problem or event. The problem that needs to be addressed is that to be effective, the digital twin must remain synchronized with its physical counterpart, or the simulation, management action, or past event analysis will become unreliable and increasingly no longer a twin at all.

The larger scale of the project, the greater the need for dependable, connected sensors that can provide telemetry real time and inform the centralized AI so that it can make both timely and accurate decisions.

This means that the devices need to be similar (standards-based) to ensure both interoperability and rapid replacement in case of a problem, and they need to be performant both in terms of networking capability (so they can report) and processing capabilities so that the data stream from them is manageable in aggregate without bottlenecking the data link.

This combination of capabilities, if done right, should reduce the cost of deployments while increasing their accuracy and reliability. We’ve just been waiting for some company to step up.

Qualcomm Steps Up To IoT

That is exactly what Qualcomm did when they announced new industrial and embedded AI platforms along with a powerful Wi-Fi SoC that is incredibly power efficient and reasonably priced, resulting in an initial 35 companies that will build solutions based on this technology…

Read the rest of the article to find out what other unique products Qualcomm announced: Qualcomm Flexes Its AI Muscles and Enables The Edge

About the Author

Rob Enderle is the president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group, where he provides regional and global companies with guidance on how to create a credible dialogue with the market, target customer needs, create new business opportunities, anticipate technology changes, select vendors, and products, and practice zero-dollar marketing. You can reach the author via email.

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