Qualcomm, Vivo, Tencent Honor of Kings and Tencent AI Lab Partner to Enable AI for Smartphones

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, is working with Vivo, Tencent Honor of Kings and Tencent AI Lab to drive and explore new gaming experiences of on-device AI applications utilizing the 4th Generation Qualcomm® Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine.

Dubbed “Project Imagination”, this joint effort utilizes the AI expertise of the four parties and is designed to bring smarter, more efficient and more immersive experiences to consumers, and spur on-device AI innovation across the mobile ecosystem.

The first implementation of “Project Imagination” takes full advantage of the powerful heterogeneous computing capabilities of the 4th generation Qualcomm AI Engine and integrated Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Elite Gaming features on the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 855 Mobile Platform in order to enable high-performance on-device AI inference in mobile gaming at scale without the cloud for the first time on Vivo’s iQOO smartphones. Building on iQOO’s strong computing power and exceptional system optimization, the user experiences of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, such as the Honor of Kings, can be upgraded and optimized.

“Qualcomm Technologies has been committed to driving forward the application and implementation of on-device AI, and seeking to create rich use cases and innovative user experiences such as gaming in collaboration with our AI ecosystem partners using the advanced Qualcomm AI Engine on Snapdragon Mobile Platforms,” said Frank Meng, chairman, Qualcomm China, QUALCOMM International, Inc. “Our technologies have already driven a broad range of AI use cases. Through this work between four parties, we are looking forward to exploring more innovative AI features and applications on devices.”

“We are excited to work with Qualcomm Technologies, Honor of Kings and Tencent AI Lab using the 4th generation Qualcomm AI Engine, and create powerful and smart AI experiences starting with the ‘Project Imagination.’ We have introduced our new Multi-Turbo together with the launch of iQOO in March this year, a technology that can fully tap the potential of hardware and thus offer both professional players and gaming enthusiasts with more stable, faster mobile gaming experiences,” said Fred Wong, general manager, creative innovation, Vivo. “Meanwhile, we are also taking concerted efforts for building an eSports AI team in mobile named ‘SUPEX’, and hope to continuously enhance and optimize the strength of the AI team through the environment in MOBA games, and ultimately deliver better competition experiences to mobile eSports.”

“The Honor of Kings is dedicated to providing consumers with excellent entertainment experiences and content,” said Jun Deng,engineering director, The Honor of Kings. “With the continuous development of 5G and AI, we’re excited to collaborate with industry-leaders like Qualcomm Technologies, Vivo and Tencent AI Lab to actively explore how advanced technologies could bring breakthroughs and innovations to the entertainment industry.”

“Tencent AI Lab focuses on combining foundational research with applications and delivering on the vision ‘Make AI Everywhere’ by improving AI perception, decision and creation capabilities. One of the key elements in the journey from building an AI ecosystem to making AI at scale is, we believe, to facilitate distributed intelligence from the cloud to the wireless edge,” said Qiang Fu, director of technology, Tencent AI Lab. “With the advent of the 5G era, we are excited about the cooperation with Qualcomm Technologies, Vivo and the Honor of Kings, as it will help drive AI to further move from the cloud to the wireless edge and the device.”

Traditionally, neural network training and inference have been performed in the cloud. Now, with the increased performance and computing power of mobile platforms, AI has rapidly moved from the cloud to the device. At the end of last year, Qualcomm Technologies introduced the 4th generation multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine, which is comprised of several hardware and software components integrated on Snapdragon Mobile Platforms to help accelerate on-device AI user experiences. The 4th generation multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine features advanced hardware cores, including Qualcomm® Hexagon™ 690 Processor, Qualcomm® Adreno™ 640 GPU and Qualcomm® Kryo™ 485 CPU. The all new Hexagon 690 Processor includes a newly designed Hexagon Tensor Accelerator (HTA) and four Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX) - a doubling of vector processing from the previous generation flagship, plus four scalar threads, all of which provide a powerful blend of dedicated and programmable AI acceleration. In addition, with a full arsenal of hardware and software features that are optimized for gaming, fully integrated Snapdragon Elite Gaming on Snapdragon 855 is engineered to bring next-level gaming experiences to premium smartphones, including smarter, more efficient and more immersive AI-enabled gameplay.

At Qualcomm AI Day in Shenzhen on April 19, 2019, Qualcomm Technologies, in conjunction with Vivo, Tencent Honor of Kings and Tencent AI Lab, showed a live demo of the first implementation of “Project Imagination.” All of the devices used for the live demo were smartphones under Vivo’s new brand iQOO, powered by the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform with Snapdragon Elite Gaming features.