Right after MediaTek upped the ante with 64-bit chipsets of their own, popular fabricator Qualcomm jumped the gun with its range of 64-bit chipsets earlier today with the launch of the Snapdragon 610 and Snapdragon 615, at the MWC.
Both these chipsets find place in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 lineup. Both feature on-board LTE connectivity as well as support for dual SIM. The CPU cores on both these chipsets come based on the Cortex A53 architecture which is a recent introduction from ARM. While the Snapdragon 615 has an octa-core CPU, the Snapdragon 610 has a quad-core one.
The CPUs are based on the ARMv8 instruction set, and use a 28nm manufacturing process to keep energy dissipation due to heat at bay. Apart from featuring on-board LTE modems, the chipsets are also capable of doing HSPA+ at 42Mbps, CDMA as well as TD-SCDMA, in a bid to cover all possible fronts.
Display capability includes support for resolution as high as Quad High Definition (2560 x 1440 pixels), with the graphics department taken care of by the Adreno 405 GPU which supports DirectX 11.2 and Open GL ES3.0.
The chipsets also come with an embedded H.265 hardware decoder for video playback. Qualcomm announced that they would be making available the chipsets in the 4th quarter this year (Q4 ‘14), which is when we can see smartphones based on the chipsets undergo production.
