Qualcomm’s slow upgrading of its processor lineup continues with the quadcore Snapdragon 610 and octacore Snapdragon 615. Both of these new chips are of the 64-bit variant, and are based on the Cortext A53 architecture. Which means they trade off some power to gain the ability to support the new ARMv8 instruction set.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 and 615 chipsets also feature the Adreno 405 GPU; which is of the same 400 series that is found in the more powerful Snapdragon 800 line. This translates into support for the latest mobile graphics APIs like DirectX 11.2 and Open GL ES3.0. Although the lower power of these new 600 series chips means that performance may not be as impressive. AnandTech is also reporting that the Snapdragon 615 will not be using all eight cores at the same time; rather it is using the route of grouping processing cores into two groups for either high or low power usage.
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The Snapdragon 610 and 615 processors are anticipated to begin sampling in the third quarter of 2014 and the first commercial devices are expected in the fourth quarter of 2014.
