IFA Insights 2017

As IFA 2017 draws to a close, we take a quick look at the overarching tech trends from the show and what they might mean in our near future.

- Marcus Wong

IFA Berlin is easily one of the largest industrial exhibitions in Europe, and every year it draws a large crowd of companies looking to show off their latest and greatest. Here’s what happened this year.

Power got smaller

Just when you thought smartphones couldn’t get any smarter, Huawei announced a new Kirin 970 processor that has a dedicated Neural Processing Unit, along with an 8-core CPU and 12-core GPU. This allows it to deliver up to 25 times the performance with 50 times the power efficiency compared to previous generation chip sets.

Huawei says they expect these new chips to improve the Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities of mobile devices of the future greatly because more processing can be done by the device itself. Contrast this to the current state, where most of the information gathered by the onboard sensors has to be sent up to the cloud for processing, and it’s easy to see how these chips will allow mobile phones to do much more.

Microsoft jumped into the Virtual Reality fray

And their version is Mixed Reality (MR). How’s that different from Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)? Well, Windows Mixed Reality headsets have a system of front-mounted cameras that allow the developers the option of bringing real objects into the virtual world, or virtual objects into the real one. Hence, ‘mixed’ reality.