Hasta La Gadget!

Having pushed the Snapdragon S4 into an outrageous number of devices last year, it seemed inevitable that Qualcomm would come to CES 2013 with an even more fiery Snapdragon S5. As it turns out, that prediction was slightly off the mark. We do have new chips to talk about, thank goodness, but a change in the branding means they’re actually called the Snapdragon 600 and 800. Both SoCs are due to arrive in high-end phones, tablets and smart TVs in the next three to six months, and both come with aggressive specs. If you haven’t got the energy to read our slightly more detailed introduction after the break, then here are two key facts to take away:

• Qualcomm hasn’t quit the rat race for a life in academia and Kauaian beach huts
• The heavyweight Snapdragon 800 promises a 75 percent performance lift over the S4 Pro, which ought to make it seriously, seriously fast.

Read on for more.

Continue reading Qualcomm outs Snapdragon 800 and 600: up to 2.3GHz quad-core, 4K video, due by mid 2013

Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Tablets

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For those keen beans out there who want to get an early taste of Qualcomm’s first quad-core chipset, news just came in that starting today BSQUARE, the usual distributor of Qualcomm dev kits, is offering the Snapdragon S4 Pro mobile development platform for a hefty $1,299 (and just for reference, the MSM8960 “Fluid” smartphone MDP is currently sold for $999). Similar to the dual-core “Liquid” slate we tinkered with last year, this new APQ8064-based MDP sports the same 10.1 WXGA display as well as 2GB LPDDR2 RAM, 32GB of storage space and Android Ice Cream Sandwich. But obviously, developers will be able to take advantage of the two extra asynchronous CPU cores plus the new Adreno 320 graphics engine, which is said to pack three to four times the processing capacity of the Adreno 225 in the current top S4 lineup. If you’re in no hurry then stay tuned for our hands-on later today.

Update: We’ve got a spec sheet after the break, and wow, there’s a 13-megapixel camera and seven mics on this slate!

Continue reading Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro quad core dev tablet now available for $1,299 (update: spec sheet)

Filed under: Tablet PCs

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro quad core dev tablet now available for $1,299 (update: spec sheet) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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