An AI for everything as Qualcomm opens Snapdragon Zeroth

Qualcomm has a vested interest in smarter mobile devices: it wants to power even more of them with its own Snapdragon chips. To that end, today sees the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine an SDK for the Snapdragon 820 chipset that promises a simpler path to deep-learning software and artificial intelligence on phones, tablets, wearables, and even in cars. It's all powered by Qualcomm Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform, and while Zeroth may sound like an enemy for the Power Rangers to fight, it's actually a way to leverage formally cloud-trapped processing entirely on a local device. Traditional machine learning - the ability to assess the world and categorize elements within it - generally requires masses of processing grunt and a big database against which to check the potential results. What Zeroth does is condense that down into a single chipset, taking advantage of the various components of Snapdragon like the Hexagon DSP, Adreno graphics, and more.