Qualcomm Brings AI to the Edge with New Networking Pro A7 Elite
his week at Network X in Paris, France, Qualcomm released its new Networking Pro A7 Elite platform, which means AI at the edge will soon be a thing on the network side of your Wi-Fi connection. The company says the platform will foster new opportunities for operators and enterprises to create intelligent and responsive Wi-Fi 7-connected services close to the user. More than this the new solution incorporates 10G Fiber, 5G, Ethernet, RF front end modules, and filters into one platform ‘from broadband to antenna’.
Stand back, AI in the Cloud – AI at the edge is here! So will AI at the edge become more commonplace and perhaps even more impactful than AI in the Cloud? Nobody knows the answer to those questions – but these are arguably exciting times for anyone with great ideas for new services delivered (in whole or in part) by neural processing on the home gateway or enterprise AP.
Qualcomm’s new Networking Pro A7 Elite platform is in many ways a leap forward. That’s because this is – as far as we know – the first networking side Wi-Fi SoC that includes a dedicated neural co-processor (Qualcomm Hexagon™ NPU). In this case the NPU delivers 40 TOPS of processing power – and if you don’t know what that is, you are not alone. TOPS is short for ‘tera operations per second’ and according to Tom’s Hardware and Intel, 40 TOPS is the NPU processing baseline for AI PCs.
That means your next Qualcomm powered home router, gateway, or enterprise AP could pack a punch when it comes to AI. In addition to the NPU, the new platform includes a separate ‘Networking AI Engine’ as part of the SoC architecture for delivering optimised connectivity.
Qualcomm says they view AI at the edge as divided into two distinct categories. “The first is network AI, which is really about using AI to deliver an optimised connectivity experience to the user. Then there’s the super exciting generative AI category, which will drive a host of value-added use cases for our clients,” says Ganesh Swaminathan, VP & General Manager at Qualcomm.
Qualcomm says they expect generative AI applications at the edge to emerge in areas such as security and surveillance, energy management and automation, personalised virtual assistants, aging in place, health monitoring, and more. Specific use cases in Wi-Fi sensing include gesture control and fall, posture, even breathing and emotion detection. Other applications include natural language processing, facial recognition, and more. All of this could soon become part of the AI service repertoire at the edge.
Meanwhile the company is naturally focused on bringing new service creation opportunities in particular to CSPs as this is the largest target market for the new platform. “The value of AI can be in many different places. When we bring the AI to the service providers edge, we envision this as a paradigm shift in terms of how service providers will bring value to their customers with new, innovative services including of course improving the user experience,” says Ganesh Swaminathan.
And developers – including service providers – are not alone when it comes to inventing – for example – the next great convenient Wi-Fi 7-delivered AI service for the home. Developers will be able to access the recently launched Qualcomm AI Hub to access actual Qualcomm-validated AI models capable of running on the Networking Pro A7 Elite platform. And if all of this weren’t enough, don’t forget that the new platform still delivers up to a whopping 33 Gbps of peak Wi-Fi 7 data rate. It’s hard not to be impressed.
