Qualcomm has announced a successor to the current performance king – the Snapdragon 800 in the form of a new chip. Called the Snapdragon 805, this chip betters the performance from the older 800’s by a fair margin. The main differences between the latest performance kid on the block and the older chip are faster clocked quad cores, a 20nm manufacturing process (As opposed to 28nm on the S800), a much faster Adreno 450 GPU and an all new built in modem called the Gobi 9×35. The cores are based on a new new Krait 450 architecture and are clocked at 2.5 Ghz. The maximum memory bandwidth is 25.6GB/s. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 however still remains a 32-bit processor and looks like we would need to wait for new 64 bit chips to counter Apple’s A7 threat.
The Snapdragon 805 – like the Snapdragon 800 supports video recording in 4K resolutions- but the S805 is also capable of playing back 4K content on Ultra HD TV’s – a capability that the Snapdragon 800 lacked. Heck, it even supports streaming 4K content via Wi-Fi – thanks to the new modem. The new Adreno 450 GPU claims a 40 percent performance boost over the outgoing Adreno 330. The Snapdragon 805 also gets an all new camera imaging processor that should lead to faster cameras and better image quality. This one also packs in a gyro sensor that should do its bit to stabilize shaky images.
The announcement of the Snapdragon 805 comes just days after MediaTek announced its new OctaCore budget chip – the MT 6592. We can expect the first of Snapdragon 805 based devices to debut in the first quarter of 2014.
