A lot has already happened at this year’s Mobile World Congress and we’re only getting started. Earlier today, Sony took to the floor to announce their latest, the Xperia Z2 complete with the Snapdragon 801. The 800 line for Qualcomm is the creme de la creme of mobile processors, but what about their mid-range and not-quite-so-incredible offerings like the Snapdragon 600 line? Well, these two are getting revamped and the mobile chip giant had two new chips to announce. The Snapdragon 610 and Snapdragon 615, both of which are 64-bit CPUs. 64-bit CPUs are going to be a staple of high-end devices this year, but Qualcomm is making a bigger change with the Snapdragon 615, by including eight processing cores inside.
Both the Snapdragon 610 and Snapdragon 615 sport Cortex-A53 core designs, and in a strange move for Qualcomm don’t feature their custom Krait CPU designs. However, they both benefit from the improved Adreno 405 GPU from Qualcomm, which has a lot in common with the Adreno 420 that’s destined to hit in the Snapdragon 805, it features the same support for up-to-date tech like OpenGL ES 3.0 and should be a fair improvement on the Adreno 320 in the Snapdragon 600. So, the Snapdragon 610 is pretty much a run of the mill ARM CPU with a custom GPU, but the Snapdragon 615 gets a little more interesting. It features eight cores as oppose to four CPU cores, and these cores are grouped into two pairs of four cores. The two pairs can then run at different speeds in order to deliver performance or power-efficiency. As all cores are said to be Cortex-A53, as the oppose to the big.LITTLE arrangement of Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 cores, we can only assume that the two groups will be running at different clock speeds.
On the connectivity side of things, both the 610 and 615 support LTE speeds of up to 150mbps and the usual array of 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.1 and more. All-in-all, it’s been a fairly quiet showing from Qualcomm at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but that can only mean that they have something bigger planned for later on in the year.