Qualcomm announces new 64-bit, eight-core SoCs with DX11 graphics

At Mobile World Congress today, Qualcomm announced that it’s building a pair of new Snapdragon 600 devices to target the 64-bit market. The first chip, the Snapdragon 610, is a quad-core design based on ARM’s Cortex-A53, while the second chip is an octa-core product based around the same ARM core. This is something of a departure for Qualcomm’s usual MO. In the past, the firm was openly scornful of MediaTek’s octa-core claims, and it typically leads with its own architectures as opposed to a standard ARM CPU core.

Like the standard members of the Snapdragon 800 and 600 family, these devices will rely on Qualcomm’s 28nm LTE modem for communication, but they’ll also include a new GPU variant based on the Adreno 420 GPU. Right now, the highest-end Snapdragon 800 devices currently on the market ship with an Adreno 330 GPU. While capable, the Adreno family has generally been an extension of the work AMD did back in 2006 – 2008, with the highest-end parts topping out with DirectX 9.0c or feature level DirectX 9_3 support. Now, Qualcomm is taking the plunge into DirectX 11 territory.