Snapdragon 805 is official; 2.5GHz quad-core application processor and a 40% more powerful GPU
The folks at Qualcomm have officially announced the latest addition to the Snapdragon family. This release is for the Snapdragon 800 family, and brings with it a lot of improvements that should have people clamoring for this hot piece of Silicon. It’s called the Snapdragon 805, which hints toward this being a slight upgrade. There’s nothing “slight” about this jump compared to the 2.23GHz Snapdragon 800 currently sitting inside phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the Nexus 5, though.
For starters, the Snapdragon 805 will feature a faster 2.5GHz quad-core Krait 450-based application core. It will also house the new Adreno 420 GPU, which Qualcomm claims is 40% more powerful than the Adreno 330 found within the base Snapdragon 800 configuration. Beyond all that, it also features increased memory bandwidth at about 25GB per second.
All that power enables the Snapdragon 805 to support resolutions up to 4K, which some industry folks are trying to get known as UltraHD. While it’ll be quite some time before a smartphone or even a tablet is able to natively display 4K content, this should be great for those who are planning to hook their devices up to any 4K televisions they are planning to buy in the future.
It’ll obviously take some time before we start to see these things inside consumer-ready devices, but Qualcomm suggests the first devices with Snapdragon 805 will begin shipping in the first half of 2014. In the meantime, we’d be happy just to see more phones with current Snapdragon 800 chipsets launch by the end of this year.