Qualcomm won’t release 802-soc for smart TVs

Qualcomm has decided not to market the 802-soc, which was announced last month and was intended for use in set-top boxes and TVs. According to Qualcomm, the demand for socs for smart TVs was lower than the company had expected.

Qualcomm announced the 802 at the CES electronics show in Las Vegas last month. However, demand for processors “designed specifically for smart TVs” is “lower than we anticipated,” a Qualcomm spokesperson wrote. The soc was due to be released at the end of this year; probably the plug has already been pulled from the soc before mass production has started.

The 802 was suitable for showing 4k images and had four Krait processor cores, with a maximum clock speed of 1.8GHz, and an Adreno 330 GPU. The Qualcomm 802 also had its own Android framework, based on Android 4.4, with which the soc had to distinguish itself from the competition. As a result, Android applications for smart TVs could be developed, including multitasking support. Many today’s smart TVs lack multitasking support and run HTML-based apps.