Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Deep Learning SDK Nudges Local Neural Nets Closer To Mainstream

Qualcomm announced the deep learning software development kit (SDK) for the company's Snapdragon 820 SoC. Qualcomm's deep learning SDK is called the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, and it's powered by the company's Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform, with optimizations designed to take advantage of the heterogeneous compute capabilities of the Snapdragon SoC. Among other things, it may be able to more effectively block malware on mobile devices. Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK will give developers a "powerful, energy efficient platform" that will help them create mobile neural network tools that can be used for scene detection, text recognition, natural language processing and more. The idea is that OEMs can run their own neural network applications locally, on-device, and don't have to communicate with the cloud.