Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 going into mass production in late May

Qualcomm’s new high-end chip, the Snapdragon 800, expected to land in tablets and smartphones, will enter mass production in May, according to Qualcomm senior PM Yufei Wang.


Qualcomm did not specify which exact devices will feature it, but of course it’s likely that we will see the chip in high-end devices. 

The Snapdragon 800 is the next step of the evolution of Qualcomm’s chips, an improvement over the Snapdragon 600 that is now part of the best performing devices on the market today. The HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and LG Optimus G Pro all use the Snapdragon 600 with its Krait 300 processor.

In Snapdragon 800, we have a pretty dramatic bump up in performance. The chip features a quad-coreKrait 400 processor clocked at up to 2.3GHz. The new Krait 400 processor comes with enhanced memoryinterface, with 2x32 LPDDR3 memory interface, lower latency to the main memory and quicker L2 cache. 

It also features the new Adreno 330 GPU bringing a nearly 50% improvement in graphics performance over Adreno 320, and nearly doubling compute performance.

It support 4K HD video capture and playback at 30fps. It also supports cameras of up to 55 megapixels. 

The new chip will be manufactured using 28nm HPm, which is the High-K + Metal Gate process, with optimized power output at maximum loads. This is a departure from the standard 28nm LP manufacturing process used until now.