Hopefully you haven't become too accustomed to Qualcomm's naming system for its Snapdragon brand of mobile processors, because today the company decided to give its chips a new naming scheme. Whereas the Snapdragon family used to go by the S1, S2, S3 and S4 identifiers, Qualcomm has now decided to go with Snapdragon 200, Snapdragon 400, Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 800 names. As one might expect, the Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 800 are the high-end members of the new group.
The Snapdragon 600 will feature a quad-core Krait 300 CPU that offers speeds of up to 1.9GHz and a new, speedier Adreno 320 graphics chip. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 600 will offer a 40 percent performance improvement over the Snapdragon S4 Pro, and that it'll do so using less power.
Moving on up the power chain, we've got the Snapdragon 800. This thing's got shiny new Krait 400 CPU cores that can reach speeds of to 2.3GHz each as well as an Adreno 330 GPU. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 800 will offer up to 75 percent better performance compared to the old Snapdragon S4 Pro, adding that the new Adreno 330 has more than twice the performance of the Adreno 320. Also packed into the Snapdragon 800 is a new LTE Cat 4 modem, the ability to capture and play back UltraHD video and support for screen resolutions all the way up to 2560x2048. Thankfully for all of the batteries out there that may be shaking at all of that power, the Snapdragon 800 also switches to 28nm High Performance for mobile (also known as HPm) technology node for low power consumption.
So when will you be able to start buying products with these shiny new chips in 'em? Well, you can put that wallet away for now. While both the Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 800 are currently sampling, the first Snapdragon 600-equipped consumer devices aren't expected until Q2 2013, while the Snapdragon 800 hardware should start appearing in the middle of this year. That may seem like a ways off, but hey, that also means that you've got plenty of time to gather up the cash to pay for all of this new silicon. We'll give you a shout once we hear more about the availability of these upcoming devices.
Via Qualcomm
- Log in to post comments