Qualcomm aims to win a number of new customers and perhaps even gain back the ones it has lost with its upcoming flagship mobile chip, the Snapdragon 820.
Qualcomm envisions the Snapdragon 820 to become a major component of high-end devices, including mobile phones, tablets and virtual reality headsets. It plans to make the chip fully available on the market in the first half of 2016.
Hopefully, the Snapdragon 820 will turn things around for the company whose current flagship, the Snapdragon 810, was ditched by one of its biggest customers.
"We're definitely very excited about what this chip can do," says Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf. "It will be very competitive. We're working very hard with lots of potential customers for this chip. Things are going very well."
There are a number of reasons to be excited about the upcoming Snapdragon 820. It will be integrated with certain visual computing components that consumers should expect to see on handsets releasing next year.
First among them is the Adreno 5xx line, which will succeed the Adreno 4xx series GPUs that are usually attached to the company's Snapdragon 808 and 810 chips. The new GPU series, the Adreno 530 and 510, promise to deliver faster speeds and increased efficiency levels as compared with the former GPUs.
According to Qualcomm, the 530 is designed to deliver a performance boost of up to 40 percent while using less power – of up to 40 percent – compared with the Adreno 430.
"We did a lot of innovation at the hardware level to minimize the amount of current the GPU draws from the battery," says VP of product management Tim Leland, who is in charge of Snapdragon visual compute products.
The new GPU series will also be able to support a handful of the latest graphics APIs. These include OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenCL 2.0, Renderscript and Vulkan.
Qualcomm claims that the Adreno 530, compared with its other GPUs, is its highest-performing version to date. The new series can also support 64-bit virtual addressing, which allows the processors to work with 64-bit CPUs under increased efficiency. They can deliver 4K video of up to 60 frames per second.
Next in line is the new Spectra ISP chip in the 820, which will allow devices to capture non-blurry images and videos even in lower-light conditions. Qualcomm says that the new chip will enable the camera to capture images that have more natural-looking skin tones and a bigger range of lights and darks.
"Essentially, the image quality would be significantly better," says Leland.
Future devices with the new chips from Qualcomm will be able to deliver more responsive graphics and notable improvements in web browsing and video playing. Leland added that the Adreno 530 was also designed to work with forward-looking apps such as those that are focused on virtual reality.
