Qualcomm Introduces 64bit Octacore and Snapdragon 801

Qualcomm has announced three new processors for mobile devices at the MWC telecom show, which kicked off in Barcelona. It concerns two new SOCs with four and eight cores that offer 64-bit support and a new Snapdragon 800 variant.

The Snapdragon 615 and 610 have eight and four Cortex A53 cores, respectively. Cortex A53 can be compared to the economical Cortex A7 but with better performance. The Snapdragon 615 and 610 are new Qualcomm midrange SOCs based on the ARMv8 architecture and they also support 64bit processing. They support lte. Qualcomm previously announced the comparable Snapdragon 410 quadcore, but that soc has an Adreno 306 GPU, while the new Snapdragons get a more powerful Adreno 405. Qualcomm promises the first smartphones with the new 64-bit Snapdragons in the last quarter of this year.

At the same time, Qualcomm has added a new top model to its line-up. The Snapdragon 801 is identical to the Snapdragon 800 but with slightly higher clock speeds. The four Krait cores in this model run at a maximum of 2.5GHz instead of 2.3GHz. The Adreno 330 has also received a small boost to 578MHz, compared to 550MHz for the fastest GPU variant of the Snapdragon 800. The Snapdragon 801 has found its way to new Xperia Z models from Sony, among other things.