The company says its NPU (Neural Processing Unit) will deliver up to seven times faster AI performance than Samsung’s older Exynos 9810 chip in the S9.

Huawei became the first to debut a dedicated NPU in a flagship smartphone with their Kirin 970 chip in the Mate 10.

In our Mate 10 coverage, we noted Huawei claimed using an NPU could increase performance up to 25x over a CPU/GPU.

Huawei pitted the Mate 10 against the Galaxy Note 8 in an internal test recognising 100 photos. The Mate 10 reportedly completed the benchmark in five seconds while Samsung’s device trailed behind at 100 seconds.

Now that Samsung will have its own NPU chip, we look forward to comparing its performance against Huawei’s efforts.

Qualcomm chips are found in most other handsets – in fact, the Snapdragon 845 is even used in the US version of the Galaxy S9.

While Qualcomm is yet to launch a dedicated smartphone NPU, the company says the 845’s combination of DSP, CPU, and GPU delivers three times faster AI performance than its predecessor.

Samsung boasts the Exynos 9820 will deliver a 20 percent boost to single-core CPU performance and 15 percent improvement to multi-core. The GPU benefits from ARM’s new Mali G76 cores, which first debuted in Huawei’s Kirin 980 chip, to deliver 40 percent more performance.

The 9820 is said to be ready for production by the end of the year so it should be on track for the S10’s expected launch in late February.

It will be interesting to see how Samsung makes use of its NPU. More competition is always good, especially from a tech behemoth like Samsung, and will help drive innovations from the likes of Huawei and Apple further.

Here’s our video of Huawei’s latest AI features in the Mate 20 Pro:

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We’ve come to expect great things from Huawei in AI. The company is quickly establishing itself as a leading player in the arena – just last week announcing new chipsets designed to seize the AI throne from Silicon Valley giants.

In the Mate 20, Huawei is debuting its latest processor – the Kirin 980.

Huawei reminded us last year’s flagship, the Mate 10, featured the world’s first AI smartphone chipset in the Kirin 970. Its successor achieves several new world-firsts.

Over the Kirin 970, the 980 delivers 75 percent better CPU and 46 percent better GPU performance. Here at AI News, what we care most about is the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) performance.

Fortunately, Huawei didn’t let us down. Over its predecessor, the NPU boasts an incredible 226 percent improvement. However, bragging about numbers is one thing but another to deliver tangible benefits.

Huawei CEO Richard Yu spent little time showcasing how the company is using AI to deliver features above its competition. The company’s tagline for the event was ‘A Higher Intelligence’ (note the letters in bold) so an emphasis on AI was to be expected.

The most impressive use of AI is for real-time Hollywood-like video effects. A demo video showed people kept in colour running while the background was in black and white. Such a feat takes serious processing power, so it was a testament to the Kirin 980’s capabilities.

Identity recognition allows Huawei to automatically trim videos with certain people in or out of the video. This would be especially useful for events such as kids parties, where you want as much footage of your own child while removing others running about.

For those looking to trim some inches off their waistline, calorie counting is one of the most effective methods.

Speaking from experience, manually inputting every meal takes a long time and is one of the main reasons people give up. Huawei is stepping in to use AI for automatically recognising foods and portion sizes to work out their calories.

In the camera, Huawei is using HiVision to detect landmarks and provide relevant information to the user. The feature also performs instant translations.

Anyone who’s used their smartphone to go for a run will know how inaccurate GPS can be. Huawei fitted a runner with various flagship smartphones and each showed a different wonky route, except the Mate 20 (of course.)

The company achieved this with AI-powered satellite selection combined with dual-frequency L1 + L5 GPS for 10x better accuracy.

Even the company’s new Huawei Watch GT makes use of AI. According to Huawei, machine learning is part of the secret behind the device’s touted two-week battery life.

Last year, Huawei impressed with AI photography features but little else. Those have returned, and been improved, but it’s good to see the company show what else AI can be used for.

Based on what we’ve seen today, Huawei’s devices have reached a higher intelligence than what we’ve seen from other smartphone manufacturers. China was once infamous for its copycats, but others would now do well to flatter Huawei with some imitation of their own.

Check out our hands-on video with the Mate 20 Pro’s AI features below:

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AI-based tasks on most smartphones today are often carried out in the cloud without the average user even being aware. Google Photos, for example, uses deep learning to artistically crop and edit landscape panorama photos like a human photographer. Photos are categorised automatically, and — as of an update earlier this year — the app will even prompt who you may wish to share the pictures with.

Dedicated AI chips will allow faster processing of various tasks on the hardware itself without a need for the cloud.

Current Mobile AI Chips

While still in their infancy, we’re starting to see dedicated mobile AI in handsets before we even head into next year.

Huawei is leading the pack with its Kirin 970 chip which features a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit). The company is claiming its NPU is able to perform an image recognition test on 2,000 images per second, 20 times faster than what the competition can do with a CPU alone.

It’s well known in the mobile industry that new technologies often don’t reach mainstream adoption until Apple gets on board. Fortunately, Apple isn’t far behind and will have dedicated AI cores in the iPhone X’s new A11 Bionic chip to power a range of new features including facial recognition and real-time analysis of 4K video for improving video recordings.

Huawei’s marketing team have been poking some fun at Apple’s expense. After the onstage failure of FaceID at the iPhone X’s announcement, Huawei posted an image of a clown with the caption “Let’s face it, facial recognition isn’t for everyone” alongside the hashtag #TheRealAIPhone ahead of the expected announcement of the Mate 10 Pro on October 16th.

We look forward to seeing whether Huawei can prove itself to be better at mobile AI than Apple, or whether Huawei will ultimately end up looking the clown.

Future Mobile AI Chips

Another given in the mobile industry is whatever Apple has, Samsung will either have or won’t be far behind.

Industry sources familiar with Samsung’s chip plans report the company has been carrying out R&D work into mobile AI chips.

“[Samsung] is in the middle of developing several types of chips that will be capable of processing massive data from AI applications on devices, eliminating the need to communicate with cloud servers,” a source from one of Samsung’s partners told The Korea Herald.

Samsung recently overtook Intel as the leading chip maker which makes this news particularly notable. We’re sure to see a dedicated AI chip debut in an upcoming Galaxy smartphone but we can also expect them in the company’s popular TVs and smart home technology.

“In the next three years or so, smartphones will have designated chips that will improve the processing of AI features by 50 percent from today,” the industry source explained. “A kind of an accelerator can be applied to empower AI devices.”

Investor Excitement

The potential for AI has excited investors who are putting their cash into chip manufacturers set to gain from this new venture.

Nvidia, who relies on the gaming market, is moving into AI and now provides chipsets for some of the world’s largest companies to power their efforts. The gaming market is often cyclical in nature but AI looks set to provide a healthy stream of revenue over the coming years.

The company’s main source of revenue is still the gaming market with $1.03 billion in sales in the first quarter of its fiscal year — although this was down from its average forecasts of $1.13 billion. However, Nvidia reported more than $400 million in quarterly revenue for its data center business selling chipsets to the many companies increasing their computing power for servers with deep learning technology.

These financial results arrive in tandem with a better-than-expected performance from Nvidia’s segment focusing on AI for self-driving cars and other automotive efforts. Combined, this more than made up for the shortfall in gaming revenue and showed investors how AI will provide a huge boon to chipmakers like Nvidia.

As a result, of any company in S&P 500 Index, Nvidia had the largest stock increase in 2016 and its shares have gained 227 percent over the past year.

“AI is the most important technology development of our time, with the greatest potential to help society,” says Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang. “As the world’s leading cloud providers deploy the world’s best AI platform, with Volta GPUs and Nvidia software, we’ll see amazing breakthroughs in medicine, autonomous transportation, precision manufacturing and much more.”

Companies including Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are upgrading their data centers with Nvidia’s Volta-based platforms. It’s clear to us, the invasion of the dedicated mobile AI chips is nigh.

Are you excited about dedicated mobile AI chips? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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