It’s only Tuesday, and yet Mobile World Congress has already proven fairly interesting, with the Galaxy S5, new smartphones from Sony and new 64-bit chips from the likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek. Just because everything is happening over in Barcelona, you didn’t think that would stop rumors coming out of Asia, did you? Well, you shouldn’t have as this latest is one hell of a rumor, and relies heavily on things that haven’t even happened to be taken even remotely serious. Still though, we can always dream, right?
Those paying attention this week will have noticed that Qualcomm announced a few new processors this week. Including the Snapdragon 610 and 615, one of which is an Octa-Core 64-bit chip based on the newer Cortex-A53 architecture. Meanwhile, at the top-end of the spectrum, we have the Snapdragon 801, which debuted in the new Xperia Z2 yesterday, an interim CPU based on the Snapdragon 800 before the 805 is ready later on in the year. However, DigiTimes is now thinking that Qualcomm will have an Octa-Core 64-bit Snapdragon 810 ready for a little later on in the year. Which seems a little crazy to us. The chip hasn’t even been announced yet, but sources are claiming that the Snapdragon 810 will be a pair for quad-core CPUs, in a big.LITTLE configuration. Bringing Cortex-A53 for power efficiency and Cortex-A57 for performance.
Now, the rest of the rumor is that Google is going to tap Qualcomm’s latest and greatest CPU towards the end of the year for the next Nexus, whatever it may be, and whoever might make it. Now, we can’t really see Google telling their handset partner who to buy their chips from, but if they’re to partner with LG once again then it might make some sense. After all, LG has a good relationship with Qualcomm, and Google is constantly lamenting battery life. As a Nexus 5 owner myself, I can say that Google has a long way to go, but they’ve also come a long way as well. Maybe big.LITTLE might be the big boost in battery life that the Nexus line needs, who knows?