The first company to use Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon 810 chip won’t be a household name here in the west.
The Vivo Xplay 5 is expected to be the first smartphone to pack Snapdragon 810 power.
According to Chinese tech analyst Pan Jiutang, the Xplay 5 will vie with the Oppo Find 9 and the Xiaomi Mi5 to be the first to support Qualcomm’s new 64-bit SoC.
Given the usual order in which China’s smartphone manufacturers typically launch their new devices, GizChina reckons that the Vivo Xplay 5 is the most likely of the three to be the first to market.
Naturally, we in the west are expecting next-generation efforts from LG, Samsung, and HTC to follow suit.
Besides a 64-bit architecture (which Google’s imminent Android 5.0 L will support), the Snapdragon 810 will also feature ARM’s 8-core big.LITTLE set-up. This energy-efficient technique employs four low-power cores for general tasks, then switches to four high-power cores when intensive tasks like HD video and 3D gaming demand it.
The Snapdragon 810 also employs the Adreno 430 graphics chip and an LTE radio, and will be built to a smaller 20nm process (the same as the recent Apple A8 chip) for greater power efficiency.
Qualcomm has some ground to make up after first the Tegra K1 from Nvidia then the A8 chip from Apple have comfortably outstripped its current processors for performance in recent months.
Expect the Vivo Xplay 5 to be announced some time in December or January, with the more familiar brands likely to announce their Snapdragon 810-packing devices a few months later.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
