Facebook and Qualcomm have announced a collaboration to support the optimization of Caffe2, Facebook’s open source deep learning framework, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon neural processing engine (NPE) framework.
An exciting development in this field is Facebook’s stepped up investment in Caffe2, the evolution of the open source Caffe framework. Caffe2 is deployed at Facebook to help developers and researchers train machine learning models and deliver artificial intelligence (AI)-powered experiences in various mobile apps. Now, developers will have access to many of the same tools, allowing them to run large-scale distributed training scenarios and build machine learning applications for mobile.
Meanwhile, the Qualcomm NPE is designed to do the heavy lifting needed to run neural networks efficiently on Snapdragon, leaving developers with more time and resources to focus on creating their innovative user experiences.
According to Qualcomm, one of the benefits of Snapdragon and the NPE is that a developer can target individual heterogeneous compute cores within Snapdragon for optimal performance, depending on the power and performance demands of their applications.
The Snapdragon 835 is designed to deliver up to 5x better performance when processing Caffe2 workloads on our embedded Qualcomm Adreno 540 GPU (compared to CPU). The Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX) in the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP are also engineered to offer even greater performance and energy efficiency.
The NPE includes runtime software, libraries, APIs, offline model conversion tools, debugging and benchmarking tools, sample code, and documentation. It is expected to be available later this summer to the broader developer community.
