i3 - March/April 2020 - 44

Business

By Jim Harris

T EC H TACT I C S

Artificial Intelligence:
A Hot Topic at CES 2020

he hottest topic at CES, in my opinion, was artificial
intelligence (AI). AI chips will add intelligence into
billions of smart devices in the coming years. These
devices will be at the edge - meaning that they'll work without
having to be connected to the cloud or a data center.

MARCH/APRIL 2020

i3_0120_Business_TechTactics.indd 44

measured the entire area of the chipsets,
then calculated the area of the NPU to
estimate the cost. He says the NPU in a
Samsung smartphone costs about $3.50.
It's $3 on Apple's A13 Bionic chip and
only $1.10 for Huawei's Kirin 970.
These AI chips are getting so cheap
(less than $1 in volume) that they will
soon be embedded in all sorts of devices,
including your stove. Imagine you are
holding a hot pie you've just taken out
of the oven. Soon you'll be able to say,
"Oven turn off " without your stove needing a Wi-Fi connection to the internet
(that's the edge part).

AI is also embedded in a new line-up
of amazing 8K TVs that were shown at
CES. These TVs have AI chips and powerful GPUs, that can upscale HD and 4K
content in real-time. These chips are so
powerful and the resulting images so
crisp that you'd think the footage had
been shot in 8K. The average size of TVs
in North America is increasing, driven
by the sales of large TVs of 70-inches
and above. At this size you can see the
huge difference that 8K makes, with 33
million pixels each individually lighting
up for crisp, clear images.
The explosion of AI edge chips being
embedded in most of our digital devices
will make them smarter - unlocking
new value for consumers.
Jim Harris is the author of Blindsided,
which focuses on disruptive innovation.
Follow him on Twitter @JimHarris

THE EDGE AI CHIP INDUSTRY IS POISED FOR GROWTH

Edge AI chips by device, 2020 and 2024 (millions of units)

2020

500 75 75 50 50
750

2024

1,000

100

150

100

250
1,600

Smartphone

Tablet

Speaker

Wearable

Courtesy of Syntiant

Syntiant won a CES 2020 Best of
Innovation Award for its NDP100
Processor. It is the first chip to put
machine learning processing into almost
any consumer device. The chip only
draws 150 microwatts of power and is so
tiny it can be embedded in a hearing aid.
What's the benefit? At a noisy party, the
AI chip can distinguish which voices are
in conversation with the hearing aid
wearer and amplify them while quietening the background noise.
We know about CPUs (central processing unit) from PCs, and GPUs
(graphics processing units) from graphics, gaming and now blockchain applications and crypto mining. Now we are
going to see a dramatic rise of NPUs -
neural processing units. Syntiant's
NDP100 is one of these.
Duncan Stewart is director of research
at Deloitte for TMT (Technology, Media
and Telecommunications). At Deloitte's
TMT Predictions 2020, Duncan predicted that AI chips at the edge are
poised for explosive growth. In 2020 a
staggering 750 million AI edge chips
will be sold and that will more than double to 1.6 billion by 2024. More than
60% of these - a billion chips - will be
embedded in our smartphones making
them even more intelligent.
AI chips are already embedded in our
smartphones, but the new generation of
NPUs are smaller, faster, cheaper and
consume less power. Duncan ripped
open the most popular smartphones and

AI and TVs

Enterprise Edge

SOURCES: MarketsandMarkets, Edge AI hardware market by device (smartphones, cameras, robots, automobiles, smart
speakers, wearables, and smart mirrors), processor (CPU, GPU, ASIC, and others), power consumption, process, end user
industry, and region-global forecast to 2024, April 4, 2019; Deloitte analysis.

I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

3/13/20 4:40 PM

http://www.twitter.com/JimHarris

i3 - March/April 2020

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