There are plenty of rumours that would have us believe that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor is going to be powering out devices before the end of the year. Unfortunately for those rumours, Qualcomm has all but shot down any notion that this will happen after announcing its new generation of GPU architecture, the Adreno 5xx series. In its press release for the Adreno 5xx, Qualcomm says that the new GPU will debut in the Snapdragon 820 along with the new Spectra image signal processing unit, and that we won’t see the Snapdragon 820 till H1 2016 – or at least, we won’t be seeing devices with it inside till then.
That is probably a little bit of a bummer of some who were hoping that there would be a performance bump to look forward to before the end of the year, particularly seeing as devices with the outgoing Snapdragon 810 have been releasing right from the start of the year. Still, it’s not like we don’t have something to look forward to – Qualcomm talks about what improvements their new architecture is going to allow which include:
- up to 40% lower power consumption;
- 40% faster graphics performance compared to the Adreno 430;
- 64-bit virtual addressing for sharing virtual memory;
- 4K video recording at 60 frames-per-second;
- Spectra image signal processing unit, which allows for three simultaneous cameras and hybrid autofocus
H1 2016 can’t come soon enough. What do you think about not seeing the Snapdragon 820 till H1 2016? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Qualcomm via XperiaBlog
