At the end of the year, the "replacement tide" was new. In addition to the release of the Xiaomi Mi 12 model equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 this month, 6 new mobile phone launches were held in the market.
Under the frequent replacement of machines, the idle speed of mobile phone chips has been faster than the speed of filling the chip gap.
According to the Voice of the Economy", China's mobile phone elimination is close to 400 million per year, while the recycling rate is only about 2%, and hundreds of millions of reusable mobile phone chips are idle.
Correspondingly, there is an imbalance between the huge consumption of chips in the mobile phone industry and the huge demand for "computing chips" in domestic massive AI application scenarios. Not only is the production capacity of new cars limited, but ALSO AI development, smart homes, game consoles and other companies have been affected by the "chip shortage".
First-hand chips are difficult to grab, resulting in enterprises having to dig deeper into "second-hand chips": "transforming" mobile phone chips into "computing power chips". If the idle mobile phone cannot circulate, the chip inside cannot exert its value; but if it can be "recycled" and transformed into a "computing chip" that can provide AI computing power, it can provide the market with hundreds of millions of edge computing intelligent terminals.
At the same time, the use of idle mobile phones can also promote carbon neutrality. The "2021 China Idle Second-hand Trading Carbon Emission Reduction Report" pointed out that due to the more precise and more complex parts required for the production of 3C electronic products, the carbon footprint of the manufacturing stage accounts for more than 95%; and each idle mobile phone transaction can achieve at least about 25 kilograms of carbon emission reduction, plus the carbon emissions deducted by the production of other 3C products by idle mobile phones, the emission reduction can be even higher. The transformation of mobile phone chips meets the "recycling and utilization of waste resources" standard of the "Green Industry Guidance Catalogue" jointly issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the Chinese Bank of China, and the National Energy Administration.
Recently, Chengdu enterprise Agaxi Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Agaxi") successfully "transformed" the idle mobile phone chip into a "computing power chip" that can exert AI computing power through its own AidLux platform, and created the first "computing power box" based on this to realize the recycling of the computing power of mobile phone chips. By adding peripheral interfaces and solving thermal problems, it can easily cope with all kinds of edge computing needs. The solution is suitable for a variety of edge computing scenarios such as AI education and geek development, but the cost can be reduced by two-thirds. Recently, Agaxi plans to disclose the transformation plan and carry out technical guidance, and jointly build a mobile phone computing cycle ecology with all walks of life.
Bold imagination, careful verification, the origin of the "computing power box"
Digital economy, computing power first.
A few days ago, SenseTime CEO Xu Li said that "the demand for computing power has increased by 1 million times in the past decade"; and Huawei also said in "Intelligent World 2030" that the computing power of a smart phone in everyone's hand today has far exceeded the main control computer when Apollo landed on the moon, and the number of global interconnected connections will reach 200 billion units in 2030.
But computing power requires hardware support: chips. "Chip panic" has led to companies having to "open source and throttling" to find chips, and Dr. Sun Xiaogang, CTO of Agaxi, is also determined to walk on two legs, while searching for chip sources, while trying to find opportunities from existing market products: using idle mobile phone chips to complete the recycling and transformation of computing power.
The computing power of idle mobile phone chips has a huge space to release: first, the computing power foundation can meet the requirements; second, the huge number of industrial chains is complete, and the magnitude meets the application needs; third, Agaxi's AidLux platform can perfectly play the AI computing power of mobile phone chips to build various AI applications.
From the perspective of computing power, the computing power of mobile phones has met the computing requirements of the edge end, and the second-hand mobile phones currently circulating on the market are concentrated in the Qualcomm 845~865 chip range, of which 845 computing power is 3TOPS (TOPS is Tera Operations Per Second, 1 TOPS represents that the processor can perform one trillion operations per second), 855 is 7TOPS, 865 is 15TOPS, 888 is 26TOPS, The computing power of mobile phone chips is equal to or even better than that of most edge computing intelligent terminals.
Judging from the number of idle mobile phones in China, the huge supply has formed a stable market. According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of used mobile phones generated in China in 2020 is estimated at 524 million units. According to the 2021 "Double Eleven" data transferred by the second-hand trading platform, the number of orders submitted by the platform's mobile phone C2B recycling business during the double 11 period this year exceeded 57,000 orders. But the recycling rate of less than 2% makes the chips of a large number of idle mobile phones have nowhere to show their talents.
From the perspective of chip adaptability, AidLux has opened up the AI development technology channel of mobile phone chips. The advantage of the Android system on mobile phones lies in the mobile Internet application ecology and entertainment interactivity, which is not suitable for AI development. However, as far as the intelligent Internet of Things (AIoT) application development is concerned, in addition to the full chip AI computing power, the Linux system environment and rich AI framework support are more suitable for AI development. In addition, the mobile phone body cannot meet the heat dissipation requirements of long-term computing, and it also needs certain adjustments for hardware conditions.
Sun Xiaogang is determined to use the AidLux platform to liberate the computing power of mobile phone chips and build an AI edge computing intelligent terminal based on them, "not to say that it is a long-term solution, at least it solves the urgent need."
Split tasks, top-level design, and work together to create project content
At the same time, solve the hardware and software in order to complete the transformation. Sun Xiaogang immediately began to dismantle the task and carry out top-level design.
In terms of software ecology, the Android system is based on the Linux kernel, and Agaxi's AidLux platform is the first cross-ecological (Android/Hongmeng + Linux) one-stop AIoT application rapid development and deployment platform, which realizes the integration of Android and Linux systems by sharing the Linux kernel. At the same time, AidLux packages millions of Android software and tens of thousands of Linux software, integrates the world's top 10 mainstream AI frameworks, and does a comprehensive environment deployment and adaptation, out of the box.
The transformation from the system, framework to software ensures the rapid migration of AI applications to the mobile phone environment smoothly and rapidly, meets the operation, debugging and release of developers, and has the prerequisite of "transforming" the second-hand mobile phone into a "computing power box" "Android+Linux+AI".
In terms of hardware problems, Agaxi has established an innovative hardware combination mode of "mobile phone motherboard + extended interface board", through the proprietary customized interface board, so that the mobile phone has the ability to adapt to USB-A, HDMI, RS232/485 serial port, RJ45 network port equipment. At the same time, it also retains the native baseband, antenna, Bluetooth, WIFI, hotspot, GPS, microphone, speaker and other components of the mobile phone, and the peripheral support is more versatile and meets more application scenarios.
Agassei's innovative hardware combination model of "mobile phone motherboard + extended interface board"
In terms of fusion use, in order to make the "computing power box" have better AI computing capabilities, Agaxi's self-developed kernel-level CPU + GPU + NPU intelligent acceleration, the overall performance of ai engineering files after running quantization is increased by 15%-30%, which can fully call and play the AI computing power of the device.
Under the steady advancement of Agassei, the first "computing power box" has been successfully applied in the field of education as an edge computing intelligent terminal.
Commercial trial to improve the "computing power circular economy"
The successful trial production of the "computing power box" has solved two major problems at the same time: to a certain extent, it can alleviate the current "lack of core"; and it has opened up a channel for idle mobile phones as "computing power chips", opened a new entrance to the "computing power circular economy", and supplemented the economic chain of second-hand mobile phones.
In the next step, Agaxi is ready to carry out relevant engineering technical support, unite more enterprises to participate in the transformation, release more mobile phone chip computing power, make the best use of idle chips, and open up a new way for low-carbon and environmentally friendly industrial manufacturing.
AidLux's future plans
"Agaxi can achieve computing power recovery and chip 'transformation' with AidLux, hoping to use our first 'hashrate box' as a standard, with AidLux as the ecological basis, to promote the commercial scenario of computing power recycling, so that computing power recovery and transformation become the norm."
Although Agaxi has provided the commercial possibility of computing power recycling, they do not regard hardware transformation as their core business, but hope to link up with other peers to jointly build an industrial ecology.
"From the perspective of pure hardware, our second-hand mobile phone sources will not be more than those of turning around and loving recycling; from the perspective of application landing, our customers understand more about the direction of transformation that they actually need." Therefore, Agaxi is ready to open up technical support and software platforms, and now uses the 'computing power box' as a reference implementation, throwing bricks and stones, and cooperating with more companies in the future to push this product to the increasing edge computing intelligent terminal market. ”
The transformation of idle mobile phone chips can also help other enterprises meet the needs of broadening business scenarios, reducing carbon emissions, and reducing business costs, while assisting in creating corporate responsibility for a circular economy.
Next, Agaxi is ready to take out 50 hashrate boxes to apply for trials for enterprises with the intention of ecological co-construction and cooperation, and the application method has been announced on the official website of AidLux; it is also online in the AidLux developer community for developers to participate in testing. Agasai is willing to explore the recycling ecology of mobile phone computing power with various industries and developers.