14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Qualcomm unveiled to the world its next-generation mobile processors in the form of Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808, and the first handset expected to be powered by the silicon has allegedly emerged online.
According to a recent article on CNMO, Chinese mobile phone maker ZTE is working on a 64-bit smartphone that features the codename of Apollo, and which should come up with one of the aforementioned chipsets.
No specific info on the processor model has been provided as of now, but it appears that this might be the first 64-bit smartphone to arrive on shelves with the Android operating system loaded on top.
However, as PhoneArena notes, Qualcomm has other 64-bit processors in its lineup too, including the Snapdragon 410, Snapdragon 610, and Snapdragon 615, and there is a great chance that ZTE will actually choose to go for one of these, especially if the smartphone is planned for launch this year.
For those out of the loop, we should note that the Snapdragon 410 and 610 processors were launched as entry- and mid-level quad-core chipsets, with Adreno 306 and Adreno 405 GPUs, respectively.
Snapdragon 410 was announced with four cores clocked in at 1.2GHz, while Snapdragon 610 has them running at 1.6GHz.
The third 64-bit CPU from the company, namely the Snapdragon 615, was unveiled as a faster, 1.8GHz octa-core processor, with the Adreno 405.
Of course, they cannot deliver the same performance capabilities as the aforementioned Snapdragon 808 and 810 CPUs (which are hexa- and octa-core chipsets, respectively) but will make it inside new devices earlier than the newly unveiled products.
ZTE Apollo is only a rumor for the time being, and no specific info on the actual plans that the Chinese vendor has for it has emerged until now.
However, it seems that the timing of its release might actually say more than one might expect about the processor that will be included in it.
Until specifics on the phone are made official, it remains to be seen what optimizations Google will make to the Android operating system in order to ensure that it will be able to scale great on 64-bit processors.
Recently, Intel has announced that it has managed to complete the kernel for the 64-bit version of Android, though the company has worked with its own chips for that, and the code won’t bode well with processors based on ARM, such as those produced by Qualcomm. Stay tuned for more on the matter.