BARCELONA, Spain—Qualcomm, after an agonizingly long wait, has finally revealed a few details about its next-gen, top-end CPU core. Called Kryo, the 64-bit CPU core will debut in the Snapdragon 820 SoC, which will begin sampling "on a leading edge FinFET process" in the second half of 2015. It should be in consumer devices by this time next year.

Those are all the definite details that we have from Qualcomm, but we can infer a few more. "Leading edge" FinFET in this case will refer to either 16nm at TSMC or 14nm at Samsung/Global Foundries. Kryo will be a 64-bit ARM chip, which means it will be compatible with the ARMv8 instruction set, but beyond that we would expect to see a brand new microarchitecture that is better suited to a wider range of usage scenarios than Krait. It's fairly safe to assume that Qualcomm will once again target performance-per-watt for both Kryo and the dozens of other hardware blocks that eventually make up Snapdragon 820.

The Snapdragon 820 SoC will play a key role in a new cognitive computing platform that Qualcomm is calling Zeroth. Cognitive computing is a fairly nebulous and nascent idea that refers to computers that can cleverly adapt to ambiguous, uncertain, human problems. In the case of the Zeroth platform, Qualcomm has developed a software suite that leverages underlying hardware blocks (the modem, the image signal processor, the audio codec, etc.) to provide some clever functionality. Intuitive Security, for example, uses behavioral analysis to provide more secure authentication and protect against malware threats. Another feature uses various environmental conditions to trigger contextual actions (yes, this requires the microphone and other sensors to be always-on). Apparently, Zeroth will even be able to "personalize and adapt interactions by recognizing [facial] expressions."

Qualcomm will be demonstrating Zeroth on the show floor at Mobile World Congress. We'll be sure to try some of them out over the next few days. There's no word on where and when we'll actually see shipping devices based on the Zeroth platform, but presumably it'll be around the same time as Snapdragon 820.