HTC's first octa-core 64-bit smartphone is on the way

HTC's next smartphone might surprise us with some high-powered specs. In a post on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, HTC says that they will have the world's first octa-core 64-bit smartphone. The current HTC flagship, the One M8 (available in both Android and Windows Phone flavors) packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, a 32-bit chip with a measly four cores clocked at 2.3Ghz. An eight-core 64-bit chip? That would be new.

HTC's not saying which phone will see this new chip, or even which chip we'd be seeing in said phone. Qualcomm has started production on multiple 64-bit 8-core chips, including the mid-range Snapdragon 615. The higher-powered Snapdragon 808 and 810 aren't expected until later this year. All use the ARM big.LITTLE format (four high-power cores for the heavy lifting and four low-power cores for mundane work).

For what it's worth, the corner render of the phone in HTC's teaser also seems like it might be mid-tier as well. It's clearly HTC design, but there might be something plasticky to it. We'll see soon enough, we suppose. What do you think?

Source: HTC (Weibo)

Derek Kessler

Derek Kessler is Special Projects Manager for Mobile Nations. He's been writing about tech since 2009, has far more phones than is considered humane, still carries a torch for Palm, and got a Tesla because it was the biggest gadget he could find. You can follow him on Twitter at @derekakessler.