14 DAY TRIAL // Qualcomm has made a pretty big announcement at MWC 2014 by unveiling its eight-core Snapdragon 6151 chip for mobile devices, which integrates LTE and 4K video streaming capabilities. This places the chip-maker ahead of Apple, in terms of 64-bit mobile chip developments.
The chip is expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of the year and will be implemented in high-end smartphones and tablets (via Ubergizmo).
The 615 chip could prove to be one of the fastest chipsets around on the market today, being based on the latest ARM 64-bit architecture ARMv8.
Qualcomm also pulled the veil off a quad-core variant, called the Snapdragon 610. So far there’s only a handful of eight-core chips on the market, with the Samsung Galaxy S4 being in the spot-light at the moment.
We should also mention that two new 610 and 615 chips would offer support to DirectX 11.2 and OpenGL ES 3.0. While ES 3.0 is nothing to fret about, DirectX 11.2 is a good indicator that Microsoft is about to unify its graphics API on ARM and Intel platforms.
This could probably mean that we’re going to see more ARM-based Windows devices coming out. The 610 and 615 also seem to be capable of supporting a full OpenGL distribution, but Qualcomm won’t include it for now.
So far, the NVIDIA Tegra K1 remains the only ARM-based chips capable of running the full version of Unreal Engine 4, so it would be a bonus to game developers if Qualcomm adhered to OpenGL too.
By bundling the chip, future mobile devices will be able to wirelessly stream 4K video resolution at a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels with integrated H.265 hardware decoder. On top of that, the integrated LTE chip will support the latest technologies in the field, including 802.11 ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.
Anyway Qualcomm will ship reference designs with the new chip architecture in the last quarter of the year, so don't expect devices running on the chip to appear on retail shelves too soon.