Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona is underway and Qualcomm has held their press conference quite recently. Very few people knew what the company intends to say at the conference itself. Qualcomm has revealed that their next big smartphone chip, the Snapdragon 820, will be able to handle their very own Zeroth cognitive computing platform. What does this mean? Well, this essentially means that the phone should be able to learn about you and the world around you in order to perform the best it can.
Sounds confusing? Well, it is to some extent, but this essentially means that the phone might be able to act on its own . It might be able to provide better protection even for unknown viruses by learning from the past experiences, or react to your movements in from of the phone in order to perform certain operations without you even asking it to. The Zeroth computing platform allows for always-on sensors which will be able to detect stuff around you and monitor motion and sounds. Sounds futuristic and odd? Well, either way you look at it, it’s on the way, we’ll see what happens next and will it be able to perform as well as Qualcomm thinks it will.
That’s not the only thing Qualcomm announced though, the company has announced “Sense ID”, a 3D fingerprint scanning tech which will be great according to Qualcomm. This technology uses ultrasound instead of the capacitive touch in order to detect your print through metal, glass or any other surface for that matter. This tech will also be able to detect sweat pores in your fingers, which will make it even more accurate and less prone to security issues. The Sense ID is already being tested and we could expect this rather soon it seems.
Qualcomm didn’t give out many details about the Snapdragon 820 chip itself, but we do know that it will use the new custom 64-bit architecture (Kryo) and that it will be more efficient than its predecessor (efficient manufacturing process). This SoC won’t be available that soon though, the company will start delivering samples to companies in the second half of 2015, so it will take some time until Qualcomm puts it in mass production.
