NNAPI Support with Google Android
The Google Android and PyTorch teams collaborated to enable support for Android’s Neural Networks API (NNAPI) via PyTorch Mobile. Developers can now unlock high-performance execution on Android phones as their machine-learning models will be able to access additional hardware blocks on the phone’s system-on-chip. NNAPI allows Android apps to run computationally intensive neural networks on the most powerful and efficient parts of the chips that power mobile phones, including DSPs (Digital Signal Processors) and NPUs (specialized Neural Processing Units). The API was introduced in Android 8 (Oreo) and significantly expanded in Android 10 and 11 to support a richer set of AI models. With this integration, developers can now seamlessly access NNAPI directly from PyTorch Mobile. This initial release includes fully-functional support for a core set of features and operators, and Google and Facebook will be working to expand capabilities in the coming months.
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