I've talked a little bit with some engineers at Qualcomm who worked on projects like this. My impression was that they make a lot of compromises when they optim

I've talked a little bit with some engineers at Qualcomm who worked on projects like this. My impression was that they make a lot of compromises when they optimize a computer vision algorithm for their hardware which slightly alters the result, but can run extremely fast with comparable performance. It's likely they're doing something similar here, which might explain the difference in confidences, but I highly doubt that it objectively classifies images better than the one running on the CPU. If anything the better performance is an illusion just because the model running on the DSP reacts more quickly.