Qualcomm Unleashes Snapdragon 805, Brings 4K Video Support

There are a number of reasons why Intel is feeling the heat. Companies like AMD, ARM, Nvidia and Qualcomm regularly bring to market their latest solutions, most of which result in the once and former king struggling to catch up.

And although Intel is seeing some success in its quest to enter the tablet and smartphone market, the regular flow of newer technologies from competitors only serve to intensify its ordeal.

Qualcomm, in particular, puts up a notable fight — the company is the world’s largest maker of mobile application processors for a reason and its hardware powers a whole bunch of mobile devices. Now the company has released a new chip that promises greatly improved performance and features.

The Snapdragon 805 is a new 800-series chip that is among the first in the world to support video in the ultra-high-definition (UHD) format. It also is the world’s fastest mobile chip in existence to date.

Murthy Renduchintala, the executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies had this to say:

“Using a smartphone or tablet powered by Snapdragon 805 processor is like having an UltraHD home theater in your pocket, with 4K video, imaging and graphics, all built for mobile.

We are delivering the mobile industry’s first truly end-to-end Ultra HD solution, and coupled with our industry leading Gobi LTE modems and RF transceivers, streaming and watching content at 4K resolution will finally be possible.”

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 makes use of four ARM Krait 450 cores that work at 2.50GHz. These are paired with the Adreno 420 graphics processing engine that promises 40 percent high performance than the predecessor and a quad-core LPDDR3 memory controller delivering 25.6GB/s of bandwidth.

Connectivity is handled by WiFi 802.11n/ac (at 2.4 and 5GHz) and Bluetooth 4.0.

The Snapdragon 805 has entered sampling, and is expected to be power mobile devices that are expected on store shelves in the first half of 2014. There is a good chance that it will power a Windows powered slate or smartphone.