Monday, April 7, 2014

Qualcomm gives sneak peek of Snapdragon 810 and 808, time to get depressed about the current gen

We all that technology moves at a crazy fast rate. It’s incredible to see how amazing our smartphones have become over the last few years. And while it can also get a little depressing when your flagship device is surpassed by a new product, what’s worse is when your flagship is still the absolute best device out there but you know that something better is coming.

Qualcomm is now teasing us with a new generation of processors. The Snapdragon 810 and 808 aren’t even close to release and the Snapdragon 805 still hasn’t come out, but Qualcomm has decided to show off its new processors anyway. Good on Qualcomm for making its current and even future products suddenly seem very out of date.

The new Snapdragon 810 will be an absolute beast. It features eight 64-bit cores, four Cortex-A57 cores for heavy lifting and four Cortex-A53 cores for the smaller tasks. It also has an Adreno 430 GPU, which is 30 percent faster than the Adreno 420 that’s in the Snapdragon 805. The unreleased 805 is already much faster than our current generation of processors, so that Adreno 430 GPU just sounds crazy. The Snapdragon 810 also includes support for 4K displays, LPDDR4 RAM, CAT6 LTE-Advanced, voice control, 2 stream MIMO WiFi and more.

The Snapdragon 808 is a more simple chipset with only two Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. The Adreno 418 GPU inside of the 808 is 20 percent faster than the Adreno 330, which is the GPU that’s included with the Snapdragon 800 and 801. Whether the Snapdragon 808 will be positioned above or below the Snapdragon 805 is still unknown, but obviously the main focus here is the Snapdragon 810.

Both the Snapdragon 810 and 808 are at least a year out, as they aren’t expected to be available until the first half of 2015. Qualcomm has teased these chips incredibly early, and we can’t see a point other than trying to keep people excited. But in a way, doesn’t it also make you a bit depressed? Leave a comment telling us your thoughts and opinions on Qualcomm’s decision to announce these processors so early.