Hot on the heels of MediaTek’s announcement, Qualcomm, one of the most popular names when it comes to mobile chips, is now also announcing its own 64-bit solution. And like MediaTek‘s chip, both the Snapdragon 610 and Snapdragon 615 are aimed at a future generation of budget-friendly, mid-range mobile devices.
The 64-bit processor wars are on, now that the two big names in mobile chip manufacturing are now facing off on the same device range. Interestingly, Qualcomm is going the extra mile when it comes to the number of cores. While the Snapdragon 610 sports four ARMv8 cores, the Snapdragon 615 has eight of them. One might remember how Qualcomm downplayed MediaTek’s obsession with octa-core chips so it is somewhat amusing to see Qualcomm jumping on board. However, the chip maker qualifies that at least in this case, more is better, especially thanks to the ability to selectively choose which cores are being used. The faster the work gets done, the faster the CPU can go back to idle.
These new Snapdragon chips also come with an improved Adreno 405 for graphics processing. They have built-in support for Cat4 LTE and dual SIM dual active modes or DSDA. The Snapdragon 610 and 615 also has full support for a variety of API, including DirectX 11.2, OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL Full Profile.
Qualcomm is also eyeing a third quarter availability date for the Snapdragon 610 and Snapdragon 615, so actual devices utilizing the 64-bit chips will most likely not appear until the end of the year.
VIA: SlashGear
