Some phones must be powerful enough to process the audio.
Re:Shazam: Why cloud GPUs finally make sense
by floatboth on Friday May 05, 2017 @09:38AM
(#14273313)
Yeah, pretty much all phones these days have relatively powerful GPUs. However the GPGPU situation is not awesome?? IIRC RenderScript is way more limited than OpenCL…
Though it seems that what they're doing is matching against the database on their GPUs, can't do that on the phone without downloading their huge proprietary dataset :D
They do not recieve a fingerprint from a client, just an audio snippet. A fingerprint for the audio snippet will need to be calculated on the GPU (probably via some FFT operation) and then matched against a db. It's probably much faster to do the db matching within GPU memory instead of shuffling fingerprint values to the CPU first (extra cycles) and doing another operation to extract a match from a key-value store (extra network calls).