Qualcomm Unveils Next-Gen Snapdragon 800, 600 Series Processors
Not to be outdone by Nvidia’s new Tegra 4 processor, Qualcomm has unveiled its latest high-end mobile-friendly chipsets at CES 2013, with the Snapdragon 800 promising to bring UHD video and mind-boggling battery performance to phones and computers later this year.
Qualcomm says that the high-end Snapdragon 800 will deliver 75 per cent better battery performance than the current top-end S4 Pro.
But the real story here is the new Krait 400 CPU inside the Snapdragon 800: not only does it support four cores at up to 2.3Ghz each, but it utilizes a new 28nm High-K/Metal Gate manufacturing process that ensures the lowest power consumption at high performance numbers. Qualcomm promises much lower latency than previous Snapdragon S4 chips, and improved L2 cache performance.
Qualcomm’s also managed to fit asynchronous SMP architecture in, which ekes the best possible performance from each core without needing specialist cores.
The new chip also handles 4K Ultra High Definition encoding and decoding, and can project resolutions of up to 2560×2048, as well as stream video wirelessly at 1080p to a Miracast-compatible television or dongle.
Somewhat overshadowed by the 800 but still impressive is the new Snapdragon 600, intended for mid-to-high-end mobile devices and offering rich graphics and 40 per cent better battery performance than the S4 Processor that’s around now.
It comes with a new Krait 300 quad-core CPU with speeds up to 1.9GHz, a speed-enhanced Adreno 320 GPU and support for LPDR3 memory.
The Snapdragon 600 should also hit phones sooner than the 800, expected by the second quarter of the year (April-June).
[Tech Radar]
