Qualcomm is offering the first deep learning software development kit (SDK) for devices powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processors. The SDK, called the Qualcomm Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, is powered by the Qualcomm Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform and is optimized to utilize Snapdragon’s heterogeneous compute capabilities to provide OEMs a platform for delivering deep learning-driven apps on device.

Common deep learning user experiences that can be realized with the SDK are scene detection, text recognition, object tracking and avoidance, gesturing, face recognition and natural language processing.

The Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK also includes the following features:

accelerated runtime for on-device execution of convolutional and recurrent neural networks on the Snapdragon 820 cores (Qualcomm Kryo CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU, Qualcomm Hexagon DSP);
support for common deep learning model frameworks, including Caffe and CudaConvNet;
supports companies in a broad range of industries, including healthcare, automotive, security and imaging, to run their own proprietary trained neural network models on portable devices.

The Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK is expected to be available for Snapdragon 820 processors in the second half of 2016.