Aside from the new powerful Snapdragon 801, Qualcomm also unveiled a pair of chips for the new wave of rock-solid mid-range devices. The Snapdragon 610 and Snapdragon 615 are 64-bit chips, packing four and eight ARMv8 cores, respectively. In addition, both of them integrate multi-mode global Cat4 LTE modem, dual-SIM/dual active (DSDA), 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1, and there’s backward compatibility with HSPA+ (42Mbps), CDMA, and TD-SCDMA.
When it comes to the GPU used, the Snapdragon 610 and 615 come with Adreno 405 which used to be exclusive to Snapdragon 800 chips. This graphic processor supports the latest mobile graphics APIs like DirectX 11.2 and Open GL ES3.0 with added support of hardware accelerated geometry shading and hardware tessellation for more detailed, realistic mobile games and “visually stunning user interfaces.” In addition, this GPU can also handle Full Profile Open CL for superior GPGPU compute, video and image processing, supporting QHD (2560×1600) displays and Miracast wireless streaming.
Qualcomm said that the new Snapdragon 610 and 615 chips will begin sampling in the third quarter, with the first products to use them hitting shelves in Q4 2014.