Confirmed: Xperia Z2 runs the Snapdragon 801 MSM8974-AB chipset

by XB on 27th February 2014

in Xperia Z2


snapdragon-801-soc-imageThere has been a lot of confusion since the Xperia Z2 was announced earlier this week at MWC, around what chipset the handset was running. The Xperia Z2 white paper suggested that it had the Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8974-AB chipset, which up until now has been classified as a Snapdragon 800 part.

However, on Monday, Qualcomm announced a new Snapdragon 801 category with a corresponding MSM8974-AC chipset, which had a slightly higher max clock speed (2.5GHz quad-core versus 2.36GHz quad-core in the AB variant). The GPU for the AC part is also clocked higher at 578MHz against 550MHz for the AB part.

With both Sony and Qualcomm tagging the Xperia Z2 as running with Snapdragon 801, many were left wondering whether the Z2 had the AB or AC chipset. Could there be a typo in Sony’s white papers and product pages? Well, we have been in touch with Sony and they have confirmed to us that the Xperia Z2 indeed runs the MSM8974-AB chipset.

We understand that Qualcomm will shortly reflect that the Snapdragon 801 includes both the 8974-AB and 8974-AC chipsets. This was a point recently confirmed by Qualcomm’s Digital Marketing Manager, Jason Woodmansee, who said that “8974AB is a specific part number for Snapdragon 801”.

On the Snapdragon 801 product page, it says that the “Snapdragon 801 processor includes the following part number: 8974 v3”. However, if you look at sources codes, both the 8974AB and 8974AC are called 8974Pro. Normally the Snapdragon 800 chipsets are referred to as 8974v2. So it could simply be the case that Snapdragon 801 now represents this 8974Pro series, which it is reclassifying as 8974v3. Hopefully this clears up some of the confusion from earlier this week.

Snapdragon 801

snapdragon-801-soc-image

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