1. MediaTek: To make 5G and AI ubiquitous, 5G baseband chip M70 will be commercially available next year
Gathering micro-messages. At Computex in Taipei recently, Cai Lixing, chief executive of MediaTek, expressed great interest in the company's development prospects in the second half of the year. In the hottest 5G and AI areas, MediaTek has a wide range of technologies and IP products. And portfolio, The future will continue to expand a variety of different applications, and strive to bring 5G, AI and other products to the user in the best form in the mobile phone or smart home and other fields.
According to Chen Guanzhou, general manager of MediaTec, MediaTek has an absolute leading edge in 5G technology, which is mainly reflected in both market and technology. First, in the market, MediaTek's 4G technology has covered the rest of the world, including Europe, the United States and China. , And have the certification of the operator. Because each operator's requirements and technology are different, all need a test, so MediaTek is very proud of its own 4G technology, whether it is coverage or performance are highly competitive .
Secondly, in terms of technology, MediaTek 5G baseband chip M70 will be officially commercialized next year. According to Chen Guanzhou, the baseband chip adopts TSMC's 7nm process technology, and will initially adopt a separate design. The future 5G baseband chips will be integrated into MediaTek's SoC.
At the same time, MediaTek is also actively participating in 3GPP conferences for the development of 5G standardization standards, and is working with Nokia, NTT Docomo, China Mobile and Huawei to develop related 5G products.
In addition to its layout in the field of smart terminals, MediaTek is currently actively deploying smart home and automotive electronics. According to Ms. Tong Jie, deputy general manager of MediaTek and general manager of the smart device business group, MediaTek has two important platforms in addition to mobile phones. , are the SmartHome device platform and the vehicle platform.
According to the visitors, because the product starts from the user experience, MediaTek's SmartHome device platform is mainly dedicated to three functions: more comfortable, safer, and more fun for entertainment. Now, MediaTek has been in the smart speaker chip field. Climb to the top position in the world.
In 2017, the smart speaker market experienced an explosive growth. Global smart speaker shipments exceeded 30 million units, a 10-fold increase compared to 3 million units in 2016. MediaTek is even more aggressive and won global smart speakers. Nearly 80% of the city's market share performed well. Visitors Jie said that in 2018 smart speakers should also have multiple growth.
As far as the vehicle platform field is concerned, according to the introduction of Tektronix, MediaTek mainly uses the capabilities of high-speed calculations in the past to make the car more energy-efficient, and combines AI technology to make everyone experience safer, more comfortable, and more convenient. That is, Sensor+ AI+ networking technology equals MediaTek's comprehensive vehicle platform landscape.
Zhou Yujun, senior vice president and chief technology officer of MediaTek, supplemented the advantages of the NeuroPilot platform, including flexible opening, heterogeneous processor operations, and high-performance APU.
2. Qualcomm shows artificial intelligence landscape Where is the future of AI?
Set micronet reported on June 6 (Reporter Zhang Yiqun) From Xiaolong 820 to Xiaolong 845, Qualcomm has evolved three generations of smartphone-based AI platforms, and Qualcomm has accumulated 10 years of research in the AI field.
At present, Qualcomm is actively promoting its terminal AI strategy in areas such as smart phones, the Internet of Things, and smart cars, and at the same time accelerating the research and development of AI's innovative technologies to build an AI ecosystem. At the Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Summit held in recent days, the heads of relevant departments shared The development strategy, progress and use cases of Qualcomm technology in support of AI presented Qualcomm's panorama in the AI field.
Smartphone AI focuses on visual, speech, AR three aspects
As a giant in the field of mobile communications, Qualcomm has made tremendous contributions to the development of mobile communications technology and smart terminals. After more than ten years of development, although the growth rate of the smart phone market is slowing, but with the Internet of Things, 5G era The arrival of the smart phone's core position once again highlights.
It is estimated that in 2018-2022, the cumulative shipments of smart phones will exceed 8.6 billion. This means that AI technology has a wide range of applications in the field of smart phones. Smartphones are the largest platform for artificial intelligence to make relevant innovations. Today, The killing popularity of mobile phone manufacturers in the AI field can already illustrate this point.
According to Gary Brotman, Director of Product Management at Qualcomm, Qualcomm focuses on three areas in the AI field of smartphones:
The first is the visual AI field. From the current situation of mobile phone manufacturers applying AI, the most AI in visual aspects, such as facial recognition, unlocking, payment, and smart camera, beauty, etc., on the one hand, visual AI technology is relatively mature, on the other hand , Mobile phone users experience high demand in this area.
The second is AI voice, using voice and intelligent terminals to communicate dialogue and better interaction.
The third is Augmented Reality (AR), which requires a high density of terminal-intensive computing capabilities. Through AR, using the surrounding environment to achieve common support for all sensors on a smartphone, providing entertainment in real time by integrating virtual and reality, education And remind services.
In the past three years, Qualcomm has promoted AI technology evolution for three generations based on the AI platform on smartphones. In this process, as the architecture of AI algorithms continues to evolve, the capabilities and capabilities of the platform have also become rich and powerful. Qualcomm is also gradually building the openness of AI ecology.
The first-generation AI platform is Xiaolong 820. Researchers and commercial developers can run neural networks on the CPU, and typically run Caffe. Caffe is the most mainstream architecture at that time, and it is the basis of many related R&D in the commercial field. It can be directly Put neural network training on the terminal CPU.
The second generation is Snapdragon 835, which introduces the neural processing engine SDK. Through in-depth cooperation with Google and Facebook, the framework provided for both is optimized, supporting TensorFlow and Caffe2 on the terminal side. This gives the developer a great deal. Convenience, according to their needs, choose the right hardware core to support AI operations.
In December of last year, the third-generation AI technology was integrated in Qualcomm's Xiaolong 845, which expanded the computing power of each core, and also extended its support for more neural network frameworks. By working directly with the neural network framework vendors, on the other hand, the ONNX exchange format is also supported, which can easily provide developers with more flexibility without having to worry about what kind of network the underlying hardware supports.
Qualcomm artificial intelligence engine AI Engine is composed of a series of hardware and software components, designed to enable terminal-side AI to provide developers with high energy efficiency and flexibility. On the hardware, by optimizing the CPU, GPU and DSP, can meet different AI applications Scene requirements for power consumption, neural networks, workloads, and energy efficiency.
In terms of software, the Android NN environment can be supported through the SDK. It also supports Hexagon NN. If the developer chooses to use the Hexagon DSP for development, the Hexagon NN library can be optimized specifically for a certain kernel to achieve the optimal energy efficiency ratio. All this brings great flexibility to developers and customers and helps them to maximize performance.
From the industry point of view, only HiSilicon's Qilin 750 set up the AI unit NPU separately, and Qualcomm and MediaTek still use the distributed computing approach. Gary Brotman believes that the smart phone AI experience cannot rely solely on a specific core, but more important It requires multiple architectures and multiple tools. At present, distributed architecture can fully meet the needs of smart phones for AI functions.
AI Voice Personal Assistant: Transformative User Interface
Many important use cases of artificial intelligence require the support of various aspects. After the maturity of visual AI, the next step of AI is considered to be AI voice. Personal digital assistants have also become one of the important use cases, such as mobile assistants, smart speakers, etc. .
According to Hou Jilei, director of the Qualcomm artificial intelligence research project and senior director of engineering technology, real-time is a very important feature of personal assistants to provide services to users at any time. From the perspective of energy efficiency, the characteristics of personal assistants' always-online model are highly effective. There are very high demands. In terms of personalization, how to provide very personalized service at the level of hearing, intention and behavior is also an important personal need for personal assistants. In terms of learning, we hope that personal assistants will continue to understand personal behaviors. , Constantly adjusting the model, and learning and training on the terminal side. From the system architecture perspective, context awareness is an important characteristic of artificial intelligence assistants, and promoting sensor multimodal learning and multimodal fusion is an important manifestation of its future capabilities. angle.
Voice interaction is a very important part of the personal assistant. Voice is the revolutionary user interaction interface that we have been looking forward to, especially in the application scenarios of hands-free (without using hands to touch the terminal). The voice interface is to create a virtual assistant. It is very important. The voice interaction interface can support four very important features. First, it is always on, it needs to be always online, and it is always ready to provide services. Second, the conversational type, personal assistant does not memorize commands, but can do Very natural and smooth, multiple rounds of normal communication. Third, personalization, how personal assistants recognize words and phrases, and a clear understanding of intentions, which is also a very important aspect of the voice interaction interface. Fourth, privacy, do not put the data Go to the cloud, but do a lot of processing in the terminal, which is also an important direction for the future development of the voice interactive interface.
In fact, as a research direction, speech interaction has been in existence for more than 50 years. Why did it suddenly become hot in recent years? Hou Jilei pointed out that about 20 years ago, the way of machine learning was traditional machine learning, not today’s. Deep learning, at that time through the Gaussian mixture model, has been able to achieve certain performance indicators. With the emergence and mining of deep learning, convolutional neural networks and recursive neural networks are constantly being applied to the speech interactive interface scene. There has been a very The important trend is: Speech recognition performance indicators will soon approach or even exceed human accuracy.
'When this important threshold was breached, a large number of voice interactive application scenarios and business models, such as consumer, enterprise, and industrial, would soon be excavated.'
Another very important trend is that the voice interaction function is rapidly migrating from the cloud to the terminal. Today, from the commercial perspective and not from the R&D perspective, voice interaction is still more of a cloud-centric architecture. Even in this case Due to low-power consumption and real-time considerations, some functions required for voice interaction such as voice noise reduction and voice activation have been processed on the terminal side. The migration from the cloud to the terminal side is a gradual process that will soon include More features in speech recognition, natural language comprehension and text-to-speech (TTS) will gradually evolve to be centered on the terminal side. The end-to-end solution driven by machine learning is driving the trend of voice interaction to the terminal side. Houying Hou indicated that the evolution of voice interaction from the cloud to the terminal lies in the advantages of privacy, timely response, etc. The long-term development direction of voice interaction in the future should be the close integration of the cloud and the terminal. Model training, model updating, knowledge base application and some more general Services, processing in the cloud can be better complemented with the terminal.
AI Brings Opportunities and Challenges to Internet of Things and Smart Cars
Today, many Internet of Things terminals that support terminal-side artificial intelligence have been introduced to the market, including smart speakers, smart assistants, smart cameras, home hubs, smart vacuum cleaners, etc. For example, in home hubs, smart speakers and smart assistants have applied voice intelligence. Application of image classification, object classification and face recognition in networked cameras. In terms of robots, for example, smart vacuum cleaners are used to avoid obstacles. Overall, terminal-side artificial intelligence is rapidly developing to provide a strong driving force for the Internet of Things.
According to Shardul Brahmbhatt, senior product manager of Qualcomm, Qualcomm's technical support terminal-side artificial intelligence use cases for the Internet of Things are generally divided into three categories: vision, audio and sensor processing.
Brahmbhatt introduced two use cases. First, in the field of enterprise security, person detection, face recognition, and face detection were used to identify employees and non-employees entering the company's building to ensure that the security system's warning signal could be used on the terminal side. Send it out without going back to the cloud for processing. Another use case is Smart City. In this use case, terminal-side artificial intelligence can help with license plate recognition, collision accident warning, and traffic condition monitoring.
Today, whether it is a traditional depot, or many new Internet companies, and many emerging unicorn enterprises want to be able to grasp the future of the car market. About the future of cars, Qualcomm has identified three major directions. First, to make cars and all things connected. Whether today's 4G or the future 5G, more than 70% of cars will support Internet of Vehicles by 2021. Many domestic and foreign large vehicle manufacturers will achieve 100% coverage of car networking this year or next year. Second, change drivers and passengers. The user experience. Over the years, the car's infotainment platform has grown rapidly from no-screen to large-screen and multi-screen, enabling full digital and multiple operating systems, while providing rich cloud-based services and content interaction. Third, automatic for the future Driving paving the way.
According to Ye Zhiping, senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm, at present, major automakers use Qualcomm's technologies and solutions. In terms of connection technology, Qualcomm is the world's largest supplier of in-vehicle information processing and automotive Bluetooth, with more than 10 years of experience. .
'Qualcomm's leading next-generation top-level infotainment solution has been adopted by a variety of cars that will be mass-produced in 2019-2020, from large screens to multi-screens and multiple operating systems. In fiscal year 2017, Qualcomm won 25 new vehicle types. Information processing and infotainment design. Fourteen top global automakers have already selected 14 brands to use the Opteron platform in their automotive infotainment designs and mass production in their next generation cars. 2019 and 2020 The first generation of Xiaolong 820 car processor will enter mass production. ' Ye Zhiping said.
At the same time, Ye Zhiping pointed out that the challenges and requirements of a series of automotive artificial intelligence need to be met. The first is security, the car will have many user privacy data, such as face or fingerprint. Second, the artificial intelligence of the car must be able to respond immediately, such as In the automatic driving state, the delay must be greatly reduced. Third, practicality and reliability, artificial intelligence must be able to operate in any state, especially in some areas without network coverage. Finally, there are still challenges of thermal efficiency and energy efficiency.
Ye Zhiping said that the power consumption usually involves artificial intelligence will be up to 100 watts, the car is more than 60 watts, the server (sever box) design requirements exceed 60 watts must be equipped with a cooling system. For the display of the current design is possible, and To achieve a true mass production of self-driving cars with reasonable cost-effectiveness and without wasting space in the car, the current technology cannot be realized. With more and more electric cars starting to be on the market, power consumption and battery mileage are also a relatively large consideration. (Proofreading/Fan Rong)
3.Qualcomm's former CEO Paul Jacobs is starting a 5G company XCOM, plans to acquire Qualcomm
Sina Technology News Beijing time on June 7 news, former chief executive of Qualcomm Paul Jacobs (Paul Jacobs) is creating a company focused on 5G wireless communications technology.
The start-up company, called XCOM, will work to solve the problems facing 5G to achieve low latency and high reliability. Qualcomm's former president Derek Aberle and former chief technology officer Matthew Grob (Matthew Grob) also joined the new company. According to the company's website, Abbott will serve as the company’s chief operating officer, Grob will serve as chief technology officer, and Jacob will serve as chief executive officer.
According to CNBC, Jacobs is still planning to privatize Qualcomm. He is working with Abbe to raise billions of dollars for the acquisition of Qualcomm.
According to an XCOM spokesperson, the company has not yet decided how many people to hire, and the management has not established the company's business model.
Aberleer told CNBC that the company may sell patent licenses for 5G technology or provide software support to companies purchasing its semiconductor products.
Abraer said: 'To prove the availability of 5G technology in IoT applications, there is still a lot of work to do. I think our company has a lot of good ideas in this area.'
He added that once the plan to acquire Qualcomm is successful, XCOM's technology will be used in Qualcomm-produced chips, and the startup may also be incorporated into Qualcomm.
4. Make a profit with your back on an apple, Earn $10 for an iPhone Broadcom
After microblogging news, US President Trump rejected the acquisition of Broadcom’s US rival Qualcomm on the grounds of national security, Broadcom’s share price once fell from an intra-year high of 273.85 US dollars to 221.98 US dollars in early May.
Although Broadcom’s board of directors passed a $12 billion stock repurchase program on April 14th, rumors concerning the downturn in iPhone sales, TSMC and Qualcomm’s peer financial reports showed that the wireless business performance was weak, Broadcom lowered the second-quarter earnings guidance. Factors have pressured Broadcom's stock price.
Every Apple phone Broadcom earns $10
However, according to JPMorgan's report, Broadcom will provide Apple with all the non-RF chips in the new iPhone, which means that each Apple phone will bring Broadcom a $10 income.
JP Morgan analyst Harlan Sur pointed out that in the next iPhone, Broadcom will maintain its share in non-RF chips. This means that Broadcom will become the only iPhone wireless charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS features the only supplier .
'We believe Broadcom will become the 100% non-RF chip supplier for the new generation iPhone in 2018, and provide chip support for connectivity (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS), etc., as well as analog interfaces and wireless charging. Apple closely cooperated. ' Sur said in the report. 'We have seen that in the 2018 iPhone model, the cost of non-RF chips has increased by 8% to 10%, including wireless charging chip upgrades and GSP/wireless charging surcharge rates The increase is the main factor in price increase. '
JP Morgan expects Broadcom’s second-quarter profit of $4.77, in line with Wall Street consensus expectations. However, JP Morgan expects Broadcom’s third quarter profit of $4.63, which is better than Wall Street consensus expectations.
'The market often ignores Broadcom’s dominant position in wireless connectivity, including Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. The close partnership with Apple will enable Broadcom to continue to be the non-RF chip supplier for all iPhones in 2018. We expect next year As Apple turned to Broadcom's next-generation Bluetooth and Wi-Fi combo chips, Broadcom will make more profits on the iPhone in 2019,' Sur said.
In addition to optimistic earnings expectations, the analyst also reiterated his rating on Broadcom stock price and raised its target share price to 337 US dollars at the end of 2018, an increase of up to 30%.
Wall Street still optimistic about Broadcom
From the quarterly earnings report, 40% of Broadcom’s overall revenue is derived from its wireless business, which is mainly dependent on iPhone sales, because Broadcom has provided eight components for the iPhone. Previously, foreign media have repeatedly Reported that Apple's latest iPhone (especially iPhone X) sales are sluggish.
However, Broadcom gradually recovered after reaching the bottom on May 4th, which is partly related to the announcement of an over-expected earnings report from Apple. The financial report shows that iPhone shipments in the second quarter were 52.2 million units, which was a 3% increase from the same period in 2017. Compared with the first quarter, it fell by more than 32%, but considering the holiday consumption factors, this fall is a normal category. Compared with sales in the same period, iPhone sales in Q18 in 2018 still set the second-best record in history.
It is true that in the field of smart phones with a slowing growth, the iPhone shipments in the future may not grow as fast as in the same period. For this challenge, Broadcom’s best response is to continue to increase the unit price of components supplied to the iPhone.
Evercore ISI analyst CJ Muse also covered Broadcom for the first time on May 24, setting a 'outperform' rating and a $300 target share price. Muse believes that concerns about the downturn in iPhone sales have been fully accounted for by Broadcom. Among stock prices, 'radical' stock repurchases and improved gross margins will become catalysts for stock price rise.
Although Broadcom’s downward adjustment of revenue expectations for the second and third quarters has kept investors cautious, Wall Street analysts overall are still optimistic about Broadcom’s future performance. (Proofreading/Mau Mao)
5.AMD unveils next-generation 7-nanometer EPYC server processor, available as early as 2019
During this year's Computex, AMD also held a conference for new products. It not only released a number of desktops with Ryzen 2 desktop processors, and new notebook products equipped with Vega GPUs. It also unveiled the development of the next generation of EPYC server processors for the first time. Progress, already out of the laboratory test phase, began to launch sample delivery tests. Although AMD did not disclose the exact release date, it is certain that the next generation of EPYC processors will be officially launched in 2019.
After years of lagging behind server competition, AMD decided to refurbish the processor architecture in June last year and adopt the new Zen computing architecture and 14nm process technology to launch the 32-core EPYC 7000 series processor and position it. Entry-level or mid-range server, lock the application market of mainstream 2 way or single server of enterprise.
At the meeting, AMD CEO Su Zifeng mentioned the use of the EPYC 7000 processor since its inception. She said that so far there have been at least 30 OEM/ODM hardware vendors, system integrators, and cloud service providers. More than 50 new server hardware have been equipped with this new processor to handle different computing tasks. She also announced that it will add three new companies, including HPE, Cisco, and Tencent in China. Start to follow up.
In addition to the EPYC 7000 processor series, last year AMD announced that there are two new EPYC processors, which will be introduced today and next year. One of the EPYC processors, codenamed Rome, will use the next-generation Zen 2 architecture, and Adding more advanced 7-nanometer process technology, there is another EPYC processor code-named Milan, which has the same process technology as Rome, all at 7nm, but with the new Zen 3 architecture.
Su Zifeng also revealed today that the launch schedule of the next generation 'Rome' EPYC processor will soon be out of the laboratory testing phase and will begin sampling by the end of this year. It will be officially launched in 2019. For this purpose, She also actually demonstrated the prototype of this new processor, to prove to everyone that she said it is true that the actual prototype is actually being tested. Although Su Zifeng stressed that in the laboratory testing environment, measured very well The performance of the processor, but she did not disclose too much detail about this new processor.
AMD CEO Su Zifeng also demonstrated the prototype of the next generation of EPYC processor for the first time at the new product presentation today. He also mentioned that the sample delivery test will be launched soon. It is expected to be launched in 2019.
Previously, Su Zifeng had boasted that 20% of the world's desktop processor market will be accounted for this year, but in terms of server processor market share, the senior vice president of AMD's data center and embedded system solutions group. Crest General Manager Forrest Norrod is also quite optimistic, and even he said that according to the company’s expectations, the global market will be expected to reach 5% by the end of this year. In the long run, he further stated that he will surpass 27% of the heyday of the year. The city accounts for the goal.
Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager of the AMD Data Center and Embedded Systems Solutions Group, is optimistic about the growth of the global market for AMD server processors this year. It is expected that the company will have a chance to win 5% of the global market by the end of the year.
Forrest Norrod is not only optimistic about the long-term development of EPYC processors, he also said that the new EPYC processor introduced next year, will have more powerful performance and energy-saving performance, and will be compatible with the existing EPYC processor architecture.
In addition to the next-generation EPYC adopting the latest 7-nanometer process technology, AMD introduced another new Vega graphics card on the venue, which also uses the same 7-nanometer process, and is expected to be launched this year.
6.CEVA Introduces Deep Learning to IoT Edge Devices
Machine learning is rapidly becoming a defining feature of the Internet of Things (IoT) device. Appliances now support voice-driven interfaces that can intelligently respond to natural language patterns. Now, by demonstrating to robots on smart phone cameras. The process can show robots how to move materials around the factory site and program other machines. At the same time, the functions of smart phones become smarter. These applications are the most successful to date, can handle complex, multi-data-oriented Artificial intelligence structure: deep neural network (DNN).
Smart moves to edge devices