Qualcomm details Snapdragon 810 and 808 64-bit smartphone chips with 300Mbps LTE support

New smartphone chips offer support for high-speed LTE networks and 4K displays

Chipmaker Qualcomm has disclosed its latest Snapdragon chips aimed at smartphones, boasting 64-bit processing, 4K graphics support and built-in LTE Advanced modem capabilities that could provide mobile data speeds of up to 300Mbps.

Announced today, the Snapdragon 810 and 808 processors will begin sampling to smartphone makers in the second half of 2014 and are expected to appear in commercial devices by the first half of 2015, Qualcomm said.

The new chips are designed to deliver the ultimate connected mobile computing experiences in video, imaging and graphics, according to Adam Kerin, senior marketing manager for Snapdragon, writing on the Qualcomm blog.

"These are our highest-performing mobile processors to date with our most advanced 4G LTE connections yet. Each is designed to deliver more of what you want, wherever you want it, and use less power than any other mobile processor with integrated 4G LTE and 64-bit computing performance - all packed into a single chip," he said.

The Snapdragon 810 combines four ARM Cortex-A57 cores with four Cortex-A53 cores in a big.Little processing model, where the Cortex-A57 cores provide high-performance power, with the Cortex-A53 cores being used when greater power efficiency is required.

These are combined with an Adreno 430 graphics processing unit (GPU), which delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics performance and double the general-purpose computing on GPUs compute performance, compared with the Adreno 420. It supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and hardware tessellation, geometry shaders and programmable blending, capable of driving video on a 4K (4096×2160) Ultra HD display.

Qualcomm said the Snapdragon 810 is the first processor with 14-bit dual Image Signal Processors (ISPs), which support image capture up to 55MP resolution.
The Snapdragon 808 processor is designed for premium performance, with two Cortex-A57 cores paired with a quad Cortex-A53 CPU block. It features a new Adreno 418 GPU designed for WQXGA (2560x1600) displays.

Both chips integrate Qualcomm's 4th Generation Cat 6 LTE Advanced multimode modem, which supports aggregation of three 20MHz carriers on 4G LTE mobile networks, enabling speeds of up to 300Mbps on networks that support this, according to the firm.