Qualcomm and Microsoft work together to promote end-side AI scale-up at the Microsoft Build developer Conference

     During Microsoft's Build 2023 developer conference, Qualcomm Technologies showcased the company's latest end-side AI innovations, including running generative AI on the Snapdragon computing platform and a new path for developers to create apps on Windows 11 PCS powered by the Snapdragon platform.

     Ziad Asghar, senior vice president of product management at Qualcomm Technologies, said: "In order for generative AI to be truly accepted and used by more people, a lot of inference work needs to be handled at edge terminals. Our industry-leading AI hardware and software enable developers to take full advantage of our powerful AI capabilities to create amazing new user experiences on Snapdragon powered laptops, phones and other devices."

     The future of AI requires both end-side AI and cloud-based AI. Running AI applications on the end side increases cost effectiveness, enhances privacy, personalization, and reduces latency. Compared with AI workload processing only on the CPU or GPU, the Snapdragon platform integrates a dedicated Qualcomm AI engine to process AI workloads more efficiently, so that small and thin devices can also support terminal AI.

     During Microsoft Build, Qualcomm Technologies will bring technology demonstrations and tools to support the development of generative AI on the next generation of Windows 11 PC. Stable Diffusion, as a generative AI model for text-generated images with more than 1 billion parameters, has been able to run completely on the terminal side. Qualcomm Technologies says models with up to 10 billion parameters, including Large language models (LLMS), are expected to be operational on the terminal side in the coming months.

     To enhance the Qualcomm AI software stack and help developers Build the next generation of end-side AI experiences, the Qualcomm AI Engine Direct SDK will be available to the public for the first time at Microsoft Build. With the ONNX Runtime and Qualcomm AI software stack, users can now run AI workloads on the AI engine on the third-generation Snapdragon 8cx platform when using the 5G Surface Pro 9 and Lenovo ThinkPad x13s.

     Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows Chip and Systems Integration at Microsoft, said: "In order to expand AI across a wide range of terminals and applications, cloud and end-side processing are indispensable. "By combining Microsoft's leadership in cloud AI and the capabilities of the Windows platform with Qualcomm Technologies' end-side AI expertise, we will accelerate the growth opportunities created by generative AI experiences."

     During the conference, Qualcomm Technologies will also demonstrate the significant performance improvements that can be brought about by natively compiling popular applications for the Snapdragon platform, and launch a new developer portal to facilitate the centralized access to key tools, resources and support required for Snapdragon development from a unified portal.