At Huawei Connect 2019 – Ken Hu, deputy chairman, Huawei spoke about three major computing trends taking place in the age of intelligence:
Excerpt from his speech is given below:
The first is demand for incredible computing power. Statistical computing is essentially a form of brute force computing; it eats up computing resources.
If you want to train an algorithm to recognize a cat, you need to feed it millions of images and let the system come to its own conclusions about what exactly defines cat-ness. This takes a metric ton of computing power. More complicated applications like autonomous driving, astronomy, and weather forecasting will take even more compute.
Second, computing and intelligence will be ubiquitous – not limited to the cloud, but present in everything from your headphones and smartphones, to specialized edge computing for things like gene sequencing. These three types of computing –on-device computing, specialized edge computing, and brute force computing on the cloud – form the computing landscape of the intelligent world.
Third, to better serve people in life and work, computing needs to be managed cooperatively across the computing landscape.
The cloud should only handle general-purpose model training, providing background support for personalized on-device AI and specialized edge computing. This not only improves experience, it’s also better for protecting privacy.
We have a lot of challenges ahead of us. We need to beef up our computing power, explore new architectures, and develop processors that meet people’s needs across all scenarios.