Qualcomm Comes Up With Next-Gen Chips, 808 And 810

Qualcomm

Qualcomm Comes Up With Next-Gen Chips, 808 And 810

Qualcomm has come out with a pair of new chips, Snapdragon 808 and 810, which are expected to power smart phones from 2015. The two integrate Qualcomm’s fourth generation Cat 6 LTE Advanced multimode modem, and the mobile chip maker’s own Andreno graphics processors, as well as support the Qualcomm RF 360 Front End Solution.

New York: The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chip will support cameras that have up to 55 MP sensors, 4K video and Ultra HD displays, high-speed LPDDR4 memory and offers upgraded Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1 and NFC connectivity. The chip’s Adreno 430 GPU is 30 per cent faster than its predecessor Andreno 420 GPU. Many smart phones are still running on the latter. The octa-core 810 chipset is expected to support many high-end phones and tablets with Ultra HD screens sometime next year.

The Snapdragon 808 chip is slightly less powerful with its 2K display support and speedy Andreno 418 GPU for WQXGA displays. This means next year’s mid-to-high-range smart phones would be sporting 2560×1600 screens. The 808 too has 4K output via HDMI and LPDDR3 memory and has improved Wi-Fi connections. Both are 64-bit chipsets and Qualcomm says that they should be smaller, lighter and better battery life than their predecessors.

The chips however will not be using Qualcomm’s own custom built Krait central processing cores. Instead they will use a combination of 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 CPU cores. It seems like Qualcomm does not yet have a Krait core that supports the 64-bit ARMv8-A instruction set ready to go. So it is using non-customized ARM cores for the upcoming Snapdragon chips.

According to analyst Patrick Moorhead, the Qualcomm’s new 64-bit System-on-Chip (SoCs) should have some of the company’s biggest mobile chip rivals scrambling to keep up. “These new chips set the foundation for Qualcomm to offer the broadest support for 64-bit Android phone and tablet SoCs in the industry. They now have 64-bit at every level except entry-level,” said Moorhead, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy.

The Snapdragon 810 will be the “highest performing Snapdragon platform to date” according to Qualcomm. Besides 30 per cent faster graphics performance it will also be dropping power consumption by 20 per cent, thanks to 20-nanometer process technology, the chip maker said.