Qualcomm won’t just wait for MediaTek to eat its launch. The very same day the Taiwanese company unveiled its octa-core chip, Qualcomm announced Snapdragon 805. As you would imagine, this chip builds on top of the Snapdragon 800, which is found in today’s top phones and tablets. Here’s what you should know:
1. It’s fast. The Krait 450 quad-core CPU is the first mobile CPU to run at speeds of up to 2.5 GHz per core. It also offers superior memory bandwidth support of up to 25.6 GB/second which will provide “unprecedented multimedia and web browsing performance.”
2. Ultra HD video support. The new Adreno 420 GPU comes with support for hardware tessellation and geometry shaders, for “advanced 4K rendering,” with even more realistic scenes and objects.
3. It’s ready for LTE Advanced. The Snapdragon 805 supports LTE carrier aggregation and LTE Category 4 with peak data rates of up to 150Mbps.
4. It will improve camera performance. The new chip introduces first Gpixel/s throughput camera support in a mobile processor designed to increase camera speed and imaging quality, while also including sensor processing with gyro integration.
5. Availability. The Snapdragon 805 processor is sampling now and expected to be available in commercial devices by the first half of 2014.