If you’re a spec junkie, then you’re probably pretty excited by the propect of 64-bit computing on mobile devices. Intel has already announced their offerings, but the 400-pound gorilla in the mobile processing market has overnight announced their upcoming 64-bit top of the line processors – the Snapdragon 810 and 808.
The CPUs will offer class leading low power consumption, which is due to the latest 20nm manuacturing process, which will help to lower power consumption. Both CPUs will offer Cat6 LTE on-board with support for 3x20MHz carrier aggregation, offering a total of 300mbps downloads. They won’t actually have an integrated wi-fi radio however, these new Qualcomm CPUs will require device makers to implement an off-chip solution for that.
But at the base, they’re both 64-bit and manufactured using the BIGlittle ARM architecture. BIGlittle pairs different CPU cores on-die, to offset lower power computing needs to lower end cores, while the big stuff gets the grunt. The Snapdragon 808 will be a Hexa-Core solution featuring 2x ARM Cortex A57 cores paired with 4x ARM Cortex A53 cores. The Snapdragon will be an Octa-Core chip, with 4x ARM Cortex A57 and 4x ARM Cortex A53 cores.
The 810 is of course the big gun, with support for LPDDR4 RAM, while the 808 will support DDR3. The Snapdragon 810 will come with an Adreno 430 GPU with support for 4K Ultra HD outputs, at 30% faster speeds than its predecessor the Adreno 420. The Snapdragon will support WQXGA (2560×1600) displays with the Adreno 418, which will offer 20% faster graphics than the Adreno 330.
All this is well and good, but don’t expect to see them in an actual product any time soon. Qualcomm has said that they expect samples to begin heading to OEMs in the second half of 2014, while actual commercial quantities will be available to OEMs by the first half of 2015. Now, to wait for official 64-bit Android support.
