Four-party collaboration, "Imagination Project" unveiled at Qualcomm AI Open Day

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), vivo, Tencent Honor of Kings and Tencent AI Lab today announced that the four parties are using the fourth-generation Qualcomm® AI Engine to jointly promote and explore new experiences for on-device AI applications. Under the name of "Project Imagination", by leveraging the long-term expertise of all parties in the field of AI, this collaboration aims to expand cross-industry cooperation in the AI ​​ecosystem, while leveraging the powerful computing power advantages of on-device AI to explore the smarter and more efficient experience that AI can bring to the terminal. As the first project of the "Project Imagination", the four parties fully utilized the powerful heterogeneous computing power of the fourth-generation AI Engine on the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 855 mobile platform to pioneer the first large-scale migration of mobile game AI reasoning capabilities from the cloud to the terminal on vivo's iQOO mobile phone. Relying on iQOO's powerful computing power and outstanding system optimization, multiplayer real-time tactical competitive (MOBA) games represented by Honor of Kings have been upgraded and optimized.

“Qualcomm Technologies has been committed to promoting the application and implementation of artificial intelligence on the terminal side, and through the advanced Qualcomm AI Engine on the Snapdragon mobile platform, we work with AI ecosystem partners to create rich use cases and innovative user experiences,” said Meng Pu, chairman of Qualcomm China. “At present, our technology has driven a wide range of AI use cases. With this four-party collaboration, we hope to work with ecosystem partners to explore innovative AI features and applications on the terminal side.”

“We are excited to collaborate with Qualcomm, Honor of Kings and Tencent AI Lab on the fourth-generation Qualcomm AI Engine, and to create powerful, intelligent AI experiences starting with Project Imagination,” said Wang Youfei, general manager of vivo’s innovation and creativity. “Starting with the launch of iQOO in March this year, we introduced the new Multi-Turbo technology, which fully taps the potential of hardware and provides a more stable and faster mobile gaming experience for team players and gamers. At the same time, we are also jointly building a mobile AI e-sports team ‘SUPEX’, and hope to continuously improve and optimize the strength of the AI ​​e-sports team through the experimental environment of MOBA game scenarios, bringing a better competitive experience to mobile e-sports.”

“Honor of Kings is committed to providing consumers with high-quality entertainment experiences and content,” said Deng Jun, technical director of Tencent’s Honor of Kings. “This collaboration with Qualcomm, vivo, and Tencent AI Lab is our active exploration of the potential of advanced technologies to break through traditions and innovate the entertainment industry against the backdrop of the continuous development of 5G and AI technologies.”

“Tencent AI Lab focuses on combining basic research and application exploration, and is moving towards the vision of ‘Make AI Everywhere’ by improving AI’s cognitive, decision-making and creative capabilities,” said Fu Qiang, technical director of Tencent AI Lab. “We believe that one of the key elements from building an AI ecosystem to scaling AI is to distribute intelligence from the cloud to the edge of wireless networks. With the advent of the 5G era, we are very excited to work with Qualcomm, vivo and Honor of Kings, which will jointly promote the further implementation of cloud AI to the wireless edge and device-side AI.”

Traditionally, a lot of training and reasoning for neural networks is done in the cloud or on a server. At present, with the continuous improvement of mobile platform performance and computing power, artificial intelligence is moving from the cloud to the terminal side. At the end of last year, Qualcomm Technologies released the fourth-generation multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine, which is a collection of hardware and software components on the Snapdragon mobile platform to accelerate the terminal-side AI user experience. The hardware cores of the fourth-generation multi-core AI Engine include the Hexagon 690 processor, Adreno 640 GPU and Kryo 485 CPU. Among them, the new Qualcomm Hexagon 690 processor includes a newly designed Hexagon tensor accelerator and four Hexagon vector extension cores, which is twice the vector processing of the previous generation flagship product, and also adds a four-thread scalar core, which comprehensively realizes proprietary and programmable AI acceleration. In addition, the Snapdragon 855 also fully integrates a series of game-optimized software and hardware features of Snapdragon Elite Gaming, helping top smartphones bring a new level of gaming experience, including a smarter and more efficient AI gaming experience driven by AI.

At the Qualcomm AI Open Day held in Shenzhen on April 19, 2019, Qualcomm Technologies, together with vivo, Tencent Honor of Kings and Tencent AI Lab, jointly realized the first live demonstration of the "Imagination Project". All the demonstration devices on site were vivo's new brand iQOO mobile phones equipped with the Snapdragon 855 mobile platform supporting Snapdragon Elite Gaming features. Attendees can also team up with the AI ​​e-sports team "SUPEX" to compete on site and experience the human-machine duel in person.