Three In Four Phones To Have AI Chips By 2022

Dedicated processors will dramatically expand the use of AI in smartphones with voice assistants being one of the first beneficiaries of ‘on-device’ AI processing, says a study

Smartphones have been leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) for some time. However, till now the processing has been done either in the cloud or distributed across the various computer chips in the device such as CPUs, GPUs and DSPs.

As AI becomes part of the mobile experience, smartphone system-on-chip (SoC) vendors are racing to improve the machine learning capabilities of their chips by integrating dedicated AI processing cores into their designs. The key benefits of this are higher AI processing performance and lower power consumption. However, this must be balanced against the actual need for AI processing, which until recently has been limited.