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CES 2013: Qualcomm Announces the Next Generation Quad-Core 600 and 800 Mobile Processors

Qualcomm’s CES press event has just started not to long ago and they’ve already announced some new mobile processors. Many of you are probably familiar with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro processor which is found in the Nexus 4, LG Optimus G, HTC Droid DNA, and many other newer devices. Well Qualcomm has just detailed their brand new and improved quad-core processors for 2013. These have improvements in every area. Including everything from speed to battery life. And the Snapdragon S4 Pro is already pretty battery efficient.

Qualcomm’s all new Snapdragon 600 and 800 series mobile processors show a huge leap in performance and usability for your favorite mobile devices. Qualcomm is currently working to improve in all areas, since their chips are the central hub of almost everyone’s content these days. The Snapdragon 600 series, is what we will be seeing first and is expected to replace the flagship S4 pro 1.5GHz quad-core chip. The company is looking to take the performance to an all new level this year.

Theoretically the Snapdragon 600 series should offer “up to 40% increased performance” compared to the S4 Pro. It also features speeds from 1.5GHz to 1.9GHz on all four cores. Now as usual, Qualcomm has focused greatly on battery life and they are promising to give us a 40% performance increase, all while offering even less battery usage. As much as we all complain about battery life, this is a great thing from Qualcomm. Of course they haven’t detailed exact battery usage, since it does differ per device and use case, we are expecting some significant changes in this new chip. The new SoC works great with a quad-core Krait 300 CPU and the graphics are powered by the much faster Adreno 320 GPU. It also has support for LPDDR3 memory.

We should be seeing devices with the new Snapdragon 600 series chips in Q2 and throughout this summer.

Now onto Snapdragon 800 mobile processor. This system on chip is claimed to power all “premium mobile and computing devices”. The Snapdragon 800 will be Qualcomm’s first processor on the improved, faster and more efficient 28nm processor fabrication. Very similar to the Cortex-A15 processors. The Snapdragon 800 series processore will include the new next-gen quad-core Krait 400 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU, Hexagon v5 DSP and much more. In addition, Qualcomm has also integrated their latest 4G LTE Cat 4 modem to deliver increased system performance, battery life, connectivity and way more.

So how fast can this new 800 series processor go? How about 2.3GHz. Is that speed really needed? Probably not, this would probably mostly be for bragging rights. But Qualcomm thinks you need a processor this fast in a flagship device. Keep in mind that most laptops don’t even have processors running that fast.

The 600 series offers a 40% improved performance over the 1.5GHz S4 Pro, the Snapdragon 800 will be offering over 75% performance improvements, as well as much improved battery life. Mostly due to the improved and more efficient 28nm processor fabrication process. So what about displays? Well the Snapdragon 800 supports displays up to 2560×2058, and also supports Miracast wireless video streaming at 1080p HD. Miracast is the feature you see in the Nexus 4, and it only works on Android 4.2 at this time.

Qualcomm has made some huge changes to these next gen Snapdragon processors. Both the 600 and 800 seem to have some pretty huge improvements compared to the S4 Pro. It’ll be interesting to see some benchmarks on these processors, and which manufacturer will use these chips first. My bet is HTC or LG. What do you think about these new Qualcomm processors? Let us know in the comments below.