Qualcomm may be under pressure in its core markets (see separate item), but nobody discounts its ability to shift the goalposts with the power of its engineering capabilities. It has repeatedly, when under pressure, managed to define a new category of functionality or performance, creating a new headstart for itself in chip sales and IPR licensing. A recent example is Zeroth, its ‘brain chip’, with which it hopes to stake a claim in emerging cognitive computing platforms. Zeroth was described last year and was on show at Mobile World Congress, in experimental form at least. It is not actually a chip but a software platform designed for future Snapdragon processors. It is trying to do the opposite of all the…