Qualcomm to begin mass production of Snapdragon 615, Snapdragon 810/808 coming later this year

By Harish Jonnalagadda
published

Qualcomm has announced that it will start mass production of its eight-core SoC, the Snapdragon 615, soon. At an event held in Shenzhen, China, Qualcomm revealed that the Snapdragon 810/808 would also be available before the end of 2014.

The Snapdragon 615 will target the mid-range smartphone segment, while the 64-bit-enabled Snapdragon 810- and 808-series CPUs are designated for high-end smartphones, supporting 4G technology.

The Snapdragon 615 is an eight-core 64-bit SoC that is produced on a 28-nm manufacturing process at TSMC. Armed with eight Cortex A53 cores, the Snapdragon 615 delivers LTE Category 4 connectivity through a Gobi 9x25 series modem.

Although Qualcomm has been wary of launching eight-core offerings in the past, it has relented with the Snapdragon 615 due to pressure from Chinese OEMs. The mid-range Snapdragon 615 is offered as an alternative to MediaTek's upcoming MT6752, which also uses an eight-core Cortex A53 arrangement. By offering stock ARM cores instead of its tweaked Krait line of CPUs, Qualcomm can contest in the mid-range segment more effectively against the likes of MediaTek.

While the Snapdragon 615 caters to the mid-range segment, the 64-bit Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 will be targeting the high-end market. Announced last month, both SoCs will be manufactured at TSMC on a 20-nm manufacturing process, and will feature a Gobi 9x35 series LTE Category 6/7 modem that can deliver a bandwidth of 300 Mbit/sec. Originally slated to launch next year, the revised timeline for the Snapdragon 810/808 is likely a result of added competition in the mobile SoC segment.

The Snapdragon 810 is an eight-core offering with four Cortex A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores, while the Snapdragon 808 is a hexa-core SoC that features two Cortex A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores. Both SoCs would be able to utilize all cores through heterogeneous multi-processing (also known as ARM's big.LITTLE architecture).

Source: Digitimes

Harish Jonnalagadda
Harish Jonnalagadda
Senior Editor - Asia

Harish Jonnalagadda is a Senior Editor overseeing Asia for Android Central, Windows Central's sister site. When not reviewing phones, he's testing PC hardware, including video cards, motherboards, gaming accessories, and keyboards.

90 Comments
  • Excellent, looking forward to Windowsphones with 810. "64-bit Is a just a gimmick on mobile" ... Lol
  • True that. See how much people using 5s has been fooled. Smh
  • He meant it was funny Qualcomm originally said 64-bit was a gimmick because they were 1 year behind Apple. Now they change their stance. Anybody who has studied microprocessors know 64-bit is the way forward.
  • Personally, I think 64-bit only grants you acces to more RAM. And besides running 64 bit applications a fraction faster than their 32-bit counterparts, I really don't see any other reason why 64 bit is necessary. What other benefits do you see? Next we will clamour for 128-bit OS when MS releases their 128-bit Windows.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
  • Oh, no!
    I have to swap my phone soon...I'll schedule it in year 2037...
  • Asked why 64 bit was necessary, I provided info. You act as if you won't live to see 2038.
  • I won't...
  • its just a theory, like it was theorized the computer system will crash when transitioning from 1999 to 2000. I think they will find a solution if they haven't already. I see no reason to jump to 64-bit just yet. though I use 64-bit Windows on my desktop as I need 4 gigs of RAM.
  • I've got a background in microprocessor technology and I'd disagree. It's not useless, but at least in the smartphone space its use, beyond marketing, is at least very questionable. It will be useful someday, and there isn't major harm done by moving to 64bit CPUs (although it is counterproductive in some areas), but there is no real benefit to be had today. That is unlikely to change for quite some time yet. I don't think anyone should really care about this either way. These 8 and 16 core CPUs, which go beyond what even very powerful desktop workstations employ, are a joke however. These do more harm than good. Such CPUs are useful for server applications, but in smartphones it's laughable and worse than useless. That OEMs want such CPUs makes sense however... it is a great marketing tool. That Qualcomm for a long time refused to jump on the core-count hype machine should tell us something. All of the more technical publications on the web have been congratulating Qualcomm on that stance, since their decisions so far really have benefitted consumers. Unfotuntely, these moves are made only to benefit OEMs.
  • Oh don't get me wrong. Its certainly useful to have each of those individual chips. But it is by no stretch of the imagination a traditional "8 core computer system" which I believe is the intention of what to sound like
  • That too, which by itself is bad enough, but the individual chips aren't as useful as you might think either. Thermal throtteling and the lack of any software that makes use of them (with no chance of that changing) are the two primary factors making most of this useless.
  • Here, they have some data: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/4
  • You know, I really don't like this.....especially for now. This will make all flagships now and due later these year look like kids toys. I think we should all wait and not purchase any phone this year....unless u have the money.
  • The stocks os SnapDragon just went down...they may end up with several cuts.
    In the future there might no be SnapDragon 900 series at all...the company is doomed.
    For now on - even if you don't really have the money - buy TWO flagships each year!
  • We just said that because Apple got it before us. Just admit it. Anyways, I hope a high end WP will get the 810 this year, or at least the 805 or 808!
  • Man, I don't understand half of this article and it excites me because it means all types of goodness is coming lol
  • Lol
  • Lol yep yep
  • Exactly what I thought LOL.
  • Lol so true
  • Hm......
  • Hope WP team will support those soc in time....
  • Keep dreaming.
  • +925
  • No, they are busy making WP more and more like lagdroid.
  • Lol!! It's Apple who is working on that.
  • So, is MS hard at work building support for these SoCs and building a 64-bit WP OS?
  • Correct me if I'm wrong but you can run a 32bit OS on 64bit chipsets, might not be optimized perfectly but it runs
  • That's a headline that WP doesn't need. :)
  • Yeah you can run on it but Microsoft need to update WP to 64bit, so it can take advantage of the processors 64bit capabilities.
  • To my knowledge ARM went the same route as AMD did with the x64 instruction set. They simply added stuff. And for quite some time it has to be said that 32 bit code ran faster on those processors (didn't check recently). The reason back then was that all Memory pointers grew bigger (32 bit to 64 bit) which in turn meant that the OS had to use more memory for storing them which meant more data had to be loaded. Make no mistake, these chips will be faster than what we have today but the reason is not that they are 64 bit. It's down to new manufacturing processes and other Microarchitectural Changes from the last generation.
  • Too many non-WP articles lately.
  • This is related as the Snapdragon 810 will likely be featured in a future high-end Windows Phone handset.
  • Mmm, WPs are powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon CPUs only.
    This will power the next Crop of Windows Phones
  • Hey people, am i the only one who thinks that now its all getting overboard ? I mean, 8 cores on a phone ? I cant think of some set of things i can do together which would require 8 cores. (not counting gimmicks. That way we can put a core for samesung style gimmicks) Come on, i know its great from a technological point of view, but what exactly are we getting at ? Do we need to draw a line somewhere ?
  • Do you know that the Moto X uses 8 co-processors to run various tasks at the same time, more efficiently using less power than using a single thread process?
  • Oh god. Please don't say that. Motorola's marketing already made me sick once.
    They don't perform similar tasks. Two votes are the CPU, one is a motion processors I believe and another is a voice processor for always on Google now? And I believe the other "four" are the gpu. They couldn't really be less related.
    It is true that a separate motion processor will use less power doing the same thing as a normal processor though. But at MOST, there are only four "processors" each built under vastly different definitions of the word. Its almost as bad as nvidia claiming their 192 core super processor. Edit: No personal offense meant. But it doesn't have eight co processors :P
  • Believe every piece of marketing fluff you read?
  • That's the point: specifically designed co-processors for a certain task. The Snapdragon 800 also has a specific co-processor for Sensor Core. The Lumia 1520 uses that for the step counting feature. If you build special hardware that has only to do one thing you can easily optimize for power. But these are general purpose CPU cores which always have to run a lot of stuff that at the moment is not needed (while doing an addition a CPU still requires a divider as well). That aside: the 8 processor figure was pure marketing as explained by someone else already. Aside from the voice processor it's basically the same Chip you find inside a Lumia 920.
  • Higher processing speeds in a phone makes way for greater technologies to run. For example, hologram displays need very high processing power. Soon with such processors available will pave a platform for new technology.
  • Any such technology would run almost entirely on the GPU, meaning the CPU you think is so important would be completely uninvolved (for the most part). The biggest obstacle is the display technology. The CPUs we have today are already more than enough. The GPUs could use improvements.
  • I have a Lumia 900 I can sell you ;)
  • @Saksham Yep, looks like you're the only one :D :D
  • Lol ! Yes seems so ! And it must feel awkward, i myself being more geeky than most people here ! ;)
  • Guess you're not interested in the new technology that will ultimately find a home inside your future Windows Phone devices then. Too bad ;-)
  • No its not that I'm not interested, just that I'm feeling that... Oh well, leave it ! Bring it on ! ;)
  • Really? Can you not see that this may be significant for WP?
  • And until I see a perfect phone from MS I'm holding on to my 920, 1520 is too big with no pen input, 930 isn't perfect with no sd and glance and styling doesn't work for me. I want a new phone for a better camera but looks like I'm going to be waiting a while.
  • Too much power!!!!!
  • Too less apps utilizing available power!
  • To less apps in WP ecosystem you mean. Other manufacturers have plans to utilize this power.
  • You can do parallel programming on WP8 just like you can on the other platforms. The problem is: only few developers do that. It's a hassle as today's programming language aren't really built for it. It's an error prone process as well. And it's not easy. But well - it's likely going to be good for the battery life if we're not utilizing all the cores to the max all the time.
  • Snapdragon 810 + 41mp pureview +64gb with sd cars +>3400 batt + water proof+ 5inches body in 925 style , cyan color. Thats my next phone. And jaime rivera can shut up with that!
  • The perfect phone... But minus the yellowish tint with flash.
  • That is gonna be one fat phone!
  • So can we get Win32 apps for Windows Phones with 64-bit CPU's?
  • No, you can't. Because those are still ARM CPUs. Win32 is only used on x86.
  • What happened to the 805?
  • I think its slated to come out in the next month or two commercially? Maybe a few. Mass production can still mean 2-3 quarters from commercial availability.
  • Hmm ... So even 8xx variant now use Cortex instead of Krait. Where did the Qualcomm I know which can produce cores that nearly equal in term of processing power, and at the same time, use much less energy? :3
  • Still there. This is a rush job to meet the unexpected demand for 64 bit
  • +1.
  • I hope that the next version of the 1520 runs on the 810 processor with a 55 mp camera and pen support and run legacy apps.
  • I wanna see 128 gigapixels in the camera.
  • I want a camera that physically absorbs all the objects it is taking a picture of and then at the push of a button spits it all out in front of you. I wouldn't recommend taking photos indoors though, or of yourself.
  • Think of the size of the picture on file.
  • That's awesome if you wanna take pics. Of Pluto..
  • Still waiting for that 41mp successor....
  • Poll...when will we see WP with these processors.....5 years
  • Sadly even 1 year is very realistic
  • IM guessing android will have this first wp8.1 devices will have to wait in line unless Microsoft pushes this for the next wave of windows phones to get the latest greatest chip set
  • MS has already opened up specs to utilize Android hardware. No reason OEM's can't put WP on those handsets if MS gets rolling with 64 bit too.
  • Hopefully WP9, but lets not hold our breathe, this is Microsoft after all.
  • Windows phones really don't need OctaCore CPU. QuardCore CPU (windows phone) wins OctaCore CPU (lagdroid).
  • Increased performance at lower power draw, for both CPU and GPU, is never a bad thing. How that is achieved doesn't matter. More cores aren't getting us there however. These core counts are about marketing, sales, spec sheets, and getting good scores on synthetic benchmarks that have no bearing on perceivable performance gains.
  • I'd rather more gpu power than cpu, San Andreas stutters occasionally on my 1520 which is bizarre for a flagship chip. I can't run it at everything max and keep a good frame rate.
  • Does it render the entire island? ;)
  • I wish.
  • its actually a poor port plus san andreas does tax ARM architechture based cpus quite a bit it has issues on my nexus 5 and 7 ,,lumias 720 and 820 ,, ipads-2,3,4 so its not hardware or software related,just poor optimisation
  • Will I'm glad it's not just me, I end up dialing back the effects drastically to keep the frame rate manageable, even then it sometimes dips. Fun game though, never got around to playing it on a console even though I owned it on xbox (but after I owned a 360, so it kind of took a back seat to other games). Really works nicely as a pick up and play game, just smashing out a mission or two on the train.
  • Still waiting for a octo-core, 3GB ram, 41MP, 32GB storage, 128GB MicroSD card support, wireless charging 6 inch Nokia windows phone with replaceable battery. Did I miss anything?
  • Nope. But does your dream phone come in 920 red? If so, then our dream of the perfect phone is one and the same. ( if a 64gb was available...!)
  • If the 920 red is the same as the 1520 glossy red then yes we are one and if a 64GB version was available I'd go mad. "I must has cell phone!"
  • aah a perfect colour choice!! my 720 is the same shade, wish more phones come with the same feel and finish, maybe a 930 design (thin metal rim instead of thick) and red polycarbonate finish
  • Cooking you breakfast, what good is a flagship phone if it can't cook you breakfast.
  • I'd faint if I asked cortana to cook me breakfast and she did.
  • A 6in microsd 1020 refresh with an 808 snapdragon would be great, and ironic!
  • Yeee doggies -- Bam --
  • it's an interesting comparison, the 615 to the mt6752 ... the 6752 will bring at least the same cpu performance, with probably twice the gpu performance or more. But, for all that, it will be relatively power-hungry. Honestly the first time I looked at Qualcomm's 810 I was concerned that it wouldn't stand up the the mediatek chip — the adreno 430 is still ~50% slower than the Mali T760 MP16. but I like qualcomm and these are just early expectations — let's see some real products :)