Machine learning is becoming more and more ubiquitous within the smartphone industry. From learning your screen brightness levels to predicting and enhancing your photos. These machine learning technologies are only beginning to transform how we use our smartphones. The thing is, it can be difficult to set up the platform for this new technology in general and then silicon vendors have to integrate it into their chips. Google's ML Kit was introduced close to a year ago and today MediaTek has announced their Helio P90 chipset will be receiving support for it sometime in Q1 of this year.
MediaTek announced the Helio P90 SoC back in December of last year as a bump up to their "premium" Helio P series chipsets. The last major chip we saw from MediaTek in this series was the P60 since the P70 was merely the same chip but binned at a higher clock-speed. The chip comes with a lot of much-needed changes, but it still lags behind in terms of integrating the newest IPs such as ARM's new Cortex A76 CPU. The company has positioned it as competition to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 670, Snapdragon 675, and Snapdragon 710, but it just doesn't really reach the mark.
However, the integration of Google's ML Kit could help it narrow the gap. When Google introduced the ML Kit as an SDK to their Firebase product it raised a bunch of developer's eyebrows. Machine learning is quickly becoming the go-to technology for applications but it can be quite difficult to set this stuff up. The goal of Google's ML Kit was to take the headache from all of this work by including five different APIs that beginners could take advantage of. These APIs include:
- Text recognition
- Face detection
- Barcode scanning
- Image labeling
- Landmark recognition
You can see how giving developers easy access to this type of technology can enhance a wide number of apps that are currently available. ML Kit offers both on-device and Cloud APIs, which makes the Helio P90 a suitable candidate as MediaTek says it can tap into 1165GMACs of processing power the chip has to offer.