LEAKED Qualcomm processors reveal sexy new specs

Specs of the new Qualcomm 820 and 600 family processors have leaked out ahead of the Mobile World Congress. The new 820 is the successor to the Snapdragon 810, which was launched last April. Qualcomm echoes Elite and names its cores after snakes. The new TS2 core is a 14nm processor, which Tom’s Hardware believes is codenamed …

[johnnymotel]

IS IT?

64 bit

[alain williams]

Re: IS IT?

Yes: 64 bit.

For something that seems designed for handheld use not using big.LITTLE seems strange. Any device will have times when it has little to do, so why not save the battery by powering down the fast but battery eating big core ?

[Message From A Self-Destructing Turnip]

Re: IS IT?

Seems like a marketing decision rather than a technical one. A customer who wants a device with eight cores wants top benchmarking results, eight big will deliver better scores. Crazy, but the same could be said for the need for eight cores in the first place.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: IS IT?

Sounds like an excellent device for distributed bitcoin mining?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: IS IT?

"Sounds like an excellent device for distributed bitcoin mining?"

Presumably the ones running any flavour of Android will be nice and easy to turn into a bot net for that purpose...

[Altered Ego]

The big and little cores use a different doping process, so the little cores are optimised for low leakage currents. It seems likely that there is only a single process at 14nm, so there is less to be gained from

having a little processor on the die. They can still reduce or stop the clocks to save power.

[John 156]

It is not clear from the 'leak' of what the TS2 consists apart from the number of cores and the process; speculation it is the replacement for Krait is exactly that.

[P0l0nium]

That's not a roadmap ... That's some notes from an internal presentation that someone has typed up and left in a wastebin.