Ah yes, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, the CPU that’s at the heart of the vast majority of today’s high-end smartphones. It’s inside my Nexus 5, at the heart of the millions of Galaxy S4s and Galaxy S5s, it powers the Moto X and the HTC One (M8). The list goes on and on, and for good reason. The Snapdragon 800 that launched at the end of last year still performs better than many other chips out there and the Snapdragon 801 inside the likes of LG’s G3 isn’t that much different at all. As such, we’re all waiting for the next big processor to come from Qualcomm, and thanks to a new leak online, it looks like the 1st half of 2015 is when we’re going to see such processors.
The leaked roadmap, which appeared on Chinese social media lists the next few high-end chips from Qualcomm, namely the Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 800 families. The Snapdragon 805 is listed as appearing during Q4 2014 and so too, are the Snapdragon 610 and 615, both chips that were announced earlier this year. Both the 610 and 615 are built using new Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 core designs from ARM, with the Snapdragon 615 sporting four Cortex-A57 cores at 1.8 Ghz and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.3 Ghz, with it being one of the first octa-core CPUs from Qualcomm. Both chips are ridiculously named, and it gets even worse with the Snapdragon 800 family.
The Snapdragon 808 and 810 are both pegged for early 2015, which would suggest that they’d be dominating the high-end lineup throughout the 1st half of 2015. The Snapdragon 808 and 810 are the big CPUs to watch, with support for LPDDR4 memory (when talking about the 810), LTE modems on the chips and more. They’re both poorly named here again, with the 808 being the six-core model and the 810 being the octa-core model, which will feature a pairing of four Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 CPUs and a new, Adreno 430 GPU. The 810 and 808 are both 64-bit models – as are the 610 and 615 – and while clock speeds for the Snapdragon 810 and 808 are unknown, we’re sure that Qualcomm will be offering similar speeds seen in the Snapdragon 805 at 2.5 Ghz.
