Qualcomm has unveiled its first high-end 64-bit chipsets in the form of the Snapdragon 810 (MSM8994) and Snapdragon 808 (MSM8992). These 20nm big.LITTLE chips include the most advanced 4G LTE connections supporting 3 x 20MHz carrier aggregation designed to reach CAT 6 speeds of up to 300 Mbps. Think of this as three lanes to bring data to your device rather than a single congested lane.
The Snapdragon 810 supports native 4K resolution with 4K HEVC (H.265) capture (encode) and 4K playback (decode). It can produce 4K video at 30 frames per second and 1080p video at 120 frames per second. The chipset is also powered by the first 14-bit camera dual image signal processors (ISP) for smartphones. This ISP supports image capture up to 55 MP and 1.2GP/s throughput.
Snapdragon 810 graphics duties will be taken care of by the Adreno 430 graphics processing unit (GPU), which supports hardware tessellation, geometry shaders and programmable blending. The Adreno 430 is 20% more power efficient than its predecessor (Adreno 420 found in the 32-bit Snapdragon 805), whilst delivering 30% faster graphics performance. Snapdragon 808 will use an Adreno 418 GPU (20% faster than the Adreno 330).
Other features include external 4K display support via HDMI 1.4 and support for Bluetooth 4.1, USB 3.0 and NFC. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 810 and 808 chipsets are expected to hit commercial devices by the first half of 2015.
Sony has used Qualcomm SoC’s (system on chip) for the majority of its smartphones and certainly for all of its flagship devices. Therefore we can reasonably assume that one of these chips are likely to feature in Sony’s flagship device in Spring 2015.
