At the Mobile World Congress 2015, Qualcomm, the largest chipset manufacturer, announced the next gen. chipset for mobile devices – the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. According to Qualcomm, this particular chipset will be built on FinFET manufacturing process and the major point here is that the Snapdragon 820 will give the devices a capability to learn about the users, with brain-like learning capabilities using features from Qualcomm’s Zeroth platform.
Based on this, the mobile devices with Snapdragon 820 will learn about the users over time, and then pick up the activity patterns and actions.
Putting the machine learning features on the chip, rather than in the cloud, will make mobile devices more personal and more useful than they are today, said Derek Aberle, president of Qualcomm, in a news conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.
Using the voice, sound, video and images, the analysed information will help it learn about the user patterns and actions. In the early stages, it seems to be basic but the use cases will change later on. In the demo showed by Qualcomm, the device was able to identify users and attach the name right away, automatically.
The Qualcomm’s custom ARMv8 CPU will be used in the chipset, and it is called Kryo. The CPU has the 64-bit architecture and Qualcomm is also applying the Kryo architecture to a server chip it has in the works. The sample units of Snapdragon 820 will begin in second half of 2015, so we can expect this to be official by the beginning of 2016.
The predecessor to this, i.e. the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 didn’t receive much response this year although it was expected to be a part of all the high-end devices. Samsung ditched it due to heating issues, and thus the Galaxy S6 has Samsung’s own Exynos processor, while the One M9 from HTC has this new Snapdragon 810 processor. Xiaomi Mi Note Pro is another device having this same processor.
