Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 820-soc with proprietary ‘learning capabilities’
Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon 820 at MWC 2015, a soc that the company aims to put cognitive capabilities in future mobile devices. Using Qualcomm’s proprietary Zeroth platform, the chip can leverage machine learning capabilities.
Qualcomm has the Snapdragon 820 produced on a Finfet process, although it is not yet known whether TSMC’s 16nm or Samsung’s 14nm process is used. The rumor mill seems to point to Samsung as a chip maker. The Snapdragon 820 is the first 64-bit processor to use Qualcomm’s proprietary ARM architecture Kryo. The first test versions of the chip will be delivered in the second half of this year. It is not yet known when the chip can be found in consumer equipment and the specifications of the soc are not yet available.
The soc forms the basis of a platform Qualcomm calls Zeroth, which will consist of new hardware and software implementations. An important asset is that the platform does not rely on cloud services to learn from its users, such as Google Now. According to Qualcomm, the mobile platform should therefore become ‘more personal’ and ‘more usable’. The ‘intelligent’ Zeroth platform will be able to be deployed across a wide range of products, such as cars, wearables, smartphones, robots and computers. The collected user data can be transferred between the different devices.
The platform should form the basis for more intuitive user experiences and interactions by adding speech and image recognition, among other things. The soc may have been optimized to handle such computational tasks faster, but Qualcomm has not yet announced further specifications about Zeroth.
At the conference in Barcelona, according to PCWorld, Qualcomm showed direct identification of users by linking live name tags. The special thing was that it happened automatically and locally, without any further information via the internet. Qualcomm says it already has more than thirty applications in mind for its Zeroth technology.