The Snapdragon 800 arrived in device’s this Fall and we were all take aback at just how fast the latest chip was. Of course, the dizzying clock speeds of 2.2 and 2.3 Ghz were impressive enough but, in both benchmarks and in real world tests, the Snapdragon 800 is a scorcher. We’ve seen it do brilliant things in the Nexus 5 and the Galaxy Note 3, for instance. Unsurprisingly though, Qualcomm have an even quicker chip up their sleeve. We knew that there was a 2.5 Ghz chip coming as manufacturers in China haven’t been exactly coy about such a thing but, now it’s finally an official product. The Snapdragon 805 is a bump to the Snapdragon 800 and if the extra 200 Mhz were the only difference then this would be just another Snapdragon 800 but, there’s more to it than that.
The Snapdragon 805 includes a new GPU, the Adreno 420, as oppose to the Adreno 330 in the 800. This, Qualcomm says, will deliver up to 40% better performance and the CPU cores themselves have changed from the Krait 400 cores, to the Krait 450 running at 2.5 Ghz with memory speeds of 25.6 GB/s, which is quite frankly, insane. All of this is just numbers to most people but, what this new chip will enable new devices to do is to playback Ultra HD or 4K video on your devices as well as capture it. Of course, the playback of such high-resolution content properly only applies to Smart TVs as we can’t imagine watching 4K content on smartphones much of a priority. As well as, camera recording performance should be vastly improved as there’s now support for gigapixel throughput.
Last but not least, the Snapdragon 805 features improvements to wireless speeds as well, as Engadget is reporting there’s an improved Gobi modem included, too. The 28nm Gobi MDM9x25 was announced earlier on this year and it brings LTE carrier aggregation and LTE 4 at 150mbps to the 805. The Gobi MDM9x35 on the other hand will allow LTE speeds of up to 300mbps thanks to LTE Advanced.
So, overall this is a hot new chip from Qualcomm and it handily improves on the already incredibly fast Snapdragon 800. We already know that a small group of devices from China will be packing the chip before the year comes to a close but, we’re still waiting on something a little closer to home on that front.