Qualcomm Snapdragon 805: Ultra HD Chip Announced

Why it mattered

At the time most smartphones on the market used some kind of Qualcomm chip. The 805 sat at the top of the Snapdragon 800 tier and was pitched as the first mobile processor with system-level Ultra HD support.

Main features

• CPU. Krait 450 quad-core at up to 2.5 GHz per core, with memory bandwidth up to 25.6 GB per second.
• GPU. Adreno 420, with hardware tessellation and geometry shaders for 4K rendering.
• Video. 4K capture and playback, plus hardware decoding of 4K HEVC (H.265) at low power.
• Camera. Dual image signal processors with gigapixel-per-second throughput and gyro-assisted stabilization.
• Sensors. Integrated low-power sensor processing on a custom DSP.

Connectivity

The chip paired with Qualcomm’s Gobi MDM9x25 or MDM9x35 modem. The MDM9x25 supported LTE carrier aggregation and LTE Category 4 with peak speeds of up to 150 Mbps. Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi allowed wireless 4K streaming, and Bluetooth 4.0 was included.

Availability

The chip was sampling at announcement and was expected in commercial devices in the first half of the following year. The original author hoped to see phones using it a few months later.