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

The first implementation of the “Project Imagination” takes advantage of the 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 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 computing power and system optimization, the user experiences of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, such as the Honor of Kings, can be upgraded and optimized.

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 moved from the cloud to the device.

Qualcomm's 4th generation multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine is comprised of several hardware and software components integrated on Snapdragon Mobile Platforms. The AI Engine features advanced hardware cores, including Qualcomm Hexagon 690 Processor, Qualcomm Adreno™ 640 GPU and Qualcomm Kryo 485 CPU. The 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.

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.