■ A variety of smart terminals will emerge in an endless stream, and its high integration with traditional industries and consumption will lead to more new formats and foster huge potential emerging markets.
■ After several years of development, the intelligent terminal industry ecology with AI chips, AI technology, and AI products has been formed.
■ End-to-end communication, end-to-cloud communication, and end-to-edge communication will be faster, smoother, and smarter, and will lead to more new and better services.
 
Smartphones, smart car terminals, smart home terminals, wearable devices, site handheld terminals, factory production line terminals, logistics intelligent handling terminals... People are familiar with these smart terminals, and smart terminals are almost integrated into the modern economic society. The field and application scenarios are very rich.
Smart terminal applications are booming
The new intelligent terminals appearing on the market have the characteristics of strong mobility, high functional integration, safe and convenient communication, strong interaction, fast response, and distinct personalization. With the rapid development of new generation information and industrial modernization technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, edge computing, industrial Internet, and various types of intelligent terminals will emerge in an endless stream, which is highly integrated with traditional industries and consumption. It will spawn more new formats and foster huge potential emerging markets.
According to the prediction of authoritative organizations, the scale of global pan-intelligent terminals will reach 15 billion in the next three years, including 1.6 billion mobile Internet access, 1.7 billion Internet of Things access, and 11.7 billion broadband Internet access. The top ten predictions of China's ICT market in 2019 issued by IDC China believe that with a series of changes in technology, market and consumption structure, artificial intelligence is crucial for the development of the next five years. In 2019, more than 10% of commercial terminal products began to adopt artificial intelligence applications, and commercial office assistants became a new bright spot. By 2022, 40% of commercial end products will use artificial intelligence. Consumption upgrades continue to drive future market growth and price increases. The digital transformation of enterprises has entered a multi-innovation stage, and more enterprises will realize the transformation and upgrading of enterprises through diversified terminal products. In 2020, 50% of education and large enterprise market users consider using VR or AR products to enhance the office efficiency and direct interaction of human-machines through large-screen electronic whiteboards, tablets, smart bracelets and other products.
At present, smart terminals are already in smart buildings, smart communities, smart parks, smart factories, car networking and smart transportation, smart logistics, smart energy, smart environmental protection, smart medical health, smart education, smart tourism, smart government, smart retail, wisdom. Security emergency, smart water, smart finance, smart credit, smart agriculture and forestry, smart media socialization and other scenarios have been widely used, laying a foundational role in building smart micro-service spaces for smart cities and smart societies, while at the same time through the edge and the cloud Remote coupling builds a complete smart application system that has become an integral part of production and life. This is also a profound reason for the unprecedented prosperity of the smart terminal market.
Industrial ecology drives a bigger market
Smart terminals are a huge market, and the entire industry chain behind them contains many links and will be a much larger market. After several years of development, the intelligent terminal industry ecology with AI chips, AI technology, and AI products has been formed. The AI chip is at the core of the industrial ecosystem and is also the base layer, followed by the technology layer and the application layer. Intelligent terminals are widely used in the application layer. Therefore, the development of AI chips will have an important impact on the consumption of smart terminals.
The AI chip is the core support of intelligent terminals. In the past two years, it has continuously achieved technological breakthroughs. At present, it is almost the hot spot of artificial intelligence investment. With the advancement of the underlying technology of AI chips and the development of related products, it is not difficult to predict that smart terminals will usher in the spring of consumption. Taking Tencent's open source terminal-side AI software framework Ncnn as a smart phone, Ncnn has deeply considered the deployment and use of mobile phones from the beginning of design, providing a high-performance neural network forward computing framework optimized for mobile phones. It is easy to transplant the deep learning algorithm to the mobile phone for efficient execution, develop an artificial intelligence APP, and bring AI to the fingertips.
In the application of AI chips to specific scenarios, the industry is generally at a turning point from the conversion of general-purpose chips to dedicated chips. The dedicated AI chips in various sub-segments are still scarce, among which key indicators such as power, power consumption and price The mutual constraint between them becomes the root cause of delaying the commercialization of dedicated chips. Taking the smart home market as an example, this problem will occur in the process of artificial intelligence landing terminal equipment. Therefore, the application of dedicated artificial intelligence chips in the field of smart homes will become a future trend. At present, many companies are doing similar things. Yunzhisheng is one of the early ones. In other consumer-related service areas, dedicated AI chips, especially localized AI chips, are still in the state of research and development, and there are no mature products to market. People's strong desire for service quality improvement and the relative lag of products have formed a sharp contradiction. It is precisely because of this contradiction that smart terminals with dedicated AI chips as the core will have huge room for development in the future.
In the entire industrial ecology, of course, we can not ignore the middle layer of the industrial ecosystem - the technical layer, the technical layer includes the knowledge map, speech recognition, image recognition, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, etc., the capability maturity of these directions will be Directly affect the depth and breadth of the role of AI chips in the consumer sector. In the long run, the impact of AI chips on smart terminal consumption may be a process that fluctuates slightly with the development of related technologies, but overall it is optimistic.
Give birth to more quality services
Driven by technological advancement, while promoting industrial upgrading, smart terminals are also promoting consumption upgrades and profoundly changing people's daily lives and work.
From the perspective of technology evolution, the development trend of intelligent terminals will be reflected in three aspects: First, with the development and maturity of artificial intelligence chips, the level of intelligence of individual products will be greatly improved, and smart technologies will be in multiple A single point of breakthrough, including new sensing technology, new multi-modal interaction mode, new data encoding and transmission methods. Second, with the development of the artificial intelligence open source software framework, the intelligent terminal software will rapidly develop under the two categories of deep learning training software and inference software, which will also help the autonomic research and development process of intelligent terminals to accelerate. Third, with the accelerated commercialization of modern network communication technologies such as 5G, network connection speed, real-time, cost, etc. will be substantially improved, and end-to-end communication, end-to-cloud communication, and end-to-edge communication will become faster and faster. , smooth and intelligent, will also spawn more new quality services.
In general, the accelerated development of artificial intelligence chips will greatly promote the development of the domestic intelligent terminal market. The development of intelligent terminals will become a new kinetic energy for economic and social development, thus promoting the formation and development of China's intelligent economy.