Today, Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) followed up yesterday’s Cat9 carrier aggregation interoperability announcement in conjunction with Ericsson with its own Gobi Modem announcement.

Gobi is Qualcomm’s own branding for its modem line of products, separate from its Snapdragon line of products. Gobi Modems are standalone modem products that are generally found in devices that do not have a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip inside or have a Snapdragon applications processor that doesn’t have a modem built-in. This new line of modems, the Gobi 9×45 line of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) modems follows in the path of the 9×35 family of modems which has yet to even take hold in the market. The MDM9x45 is a successor to the Cat6 MDM9x35 family of 20nm modems from Qualcomm. In fact, the MDM9x35 family of Gobi modems were Qualcomm’s first 20nm products and still are to this day the only 20nm chips Qualcomm has in devices now, until they start shipping Snapdragon 810 and 808 chips in phones in early 2015.

The 9×45 family of Gobi LTE modems are classified as LTE Category 10 modems which are technically classified as LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), which means they are the exact same downlink speed as Category 9 LTE, but with double the uplink speed. This means that if someone were to have a Cat9 modem and got perfect speeds out of it, they would get 450 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload, a pretty uneven performance number. Now, with Cat10, you are doubling the uplink speed to up to 100 Mbps, meaning that with Cat10 you see no downlink speed increases, but rather a doubling of the uplink speed to up to 100 Mbps. In addition to announcing the new Cat10 9×45 modem, Qualcomm also announced their second generation RF360 envelope tracker, the QFE1300 which is also sampling to customers along with the MDM9x45 modems and should be in devices in 2015.

Much like the Cat9 announcement yesterday, in order to achieve these 450 Mbps speeds, the MDM9x45 modems will need to utilize 60 MHz 3X CA (carrier aggregation) by combining three different 60 MHz bands in order to deliver such blazing speeds. It also requires 40 MHz 2x CA in order to be able to do the 100 Mbps uplink speeds. The QFE3100 is designed for a 30% smaller board area and enhanced power efficiency as compared to the previous generation, as well as allows improved calibration and implementation tools to ease Envelope Tracking design-in for OEMs and accelerate commercial deployment. This new generation of envelope tracker is once again designed to bring down the overall power consumption of the phone when using cellular data when paired with the Qualcomm MDM9x45 modem, much like the QFE1100 when paired with the MDM9x35.

And all of these speeds are fantastic to have, but one of the biggest problems is that even if there is a carrier in the US remotely capable of having three 20 MHz blocks of LTE in a single market, they also have to have the backbone to support anything remotely close to 450 Mbps downloads and 100 Mbps uploads. Right now, the carriers are severely hampering the speed of innovation, much like the ISPs do in the wired world. In fact, most of the current modems shipping in phones like the iPhone 6, LG G3, Sony Xperia Z3, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 4 and many other flagship phones all have modems capable of speeds up to 150 Mbps with CA. Yet, the highest speeds I have ever seen in the US have been 80 Mbps, just slightly over half of the speed that our phones are capable of. And if you were to take most flagship phones around your city and test it virtually any time of day, the fastest you’ll realistically get is around 30-40 Mbps up or down.

So, even though Qualcomm is clearly leading the pack with LTE innovations and LTE-A, the carriers are really limiting the value of Qualcomm’s innovations as now Qualcomm’s competitors can merely come out with Cat4 LTE modems and still achieve similar speeds with minimal effort.

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Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL) has announced today two of its newest 4G LTE-capable SoCs aimed at the low-cost smartphone market.

The Marvell PXA1908 and PXA1936 are Marvell’s latest SoCs that are aimed squarely at a global market for global LTE deployments. Both the PXA1908 and the PXA1936 are Marvell’s own 64-bit entrants into the SoC market for low-cost smartphones, utilizing ARM’s own A53 CPUs in 4 and 8 core configurations in order to deliver reasonable performance at low power.

The PXA1936 is Marvell’s higher-end 64-bit offering with a combination of the 8 ARM Cortex-A53 with a Vivante GPU capable of 1080P display and video playback as well as support for a camera of up to 16 megapixels. This is in contrast with the PXA1908, which is also a 64-bit based SoC, but with only four ARM A53 CPU cores and a Vivante GPU capable of only 720P and an image signal processor for 8 megapixel cameras.

Also, Marvell has included some advanced security features into the PXA1936 in order to enable trusted computing, DRM and mobile payments. This means that OEMs can utilize this SoC for virtually any purpose and not worry about missing features. Speaking of features, it also has an integrated location and sensor hub for added efficiency and power reduction.

The modem on both of these SoC’s is Marvell’s own and is capable of LTE TDD and FDD and maximum speeds of Cat4, which is currently enough for what most operators are delivering outside of Japan and Korea, but still far behind industry leaders like Qualcomm with Cat6 LTE. Even so, nobody is shipping Cat6 LTE for low-cost smartphones, so Cat4 LTE is more than good enough for this market segment.

Marvell’s SoCs with multi-mode LTE are already certified for use on Verizon and China mobile and are already in the AT&T modem certification process and are testing in Japan and Europe as well. These SoCs are already in the process of shipping to customers and Marvell expects that customers will have devices on the market in 2015, which means we could see some fairly decently powered sub-$100 smartphones and tablets with Marvell’s chips inside of them.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) reported their earnings for their fiscal fourth quarter of 2014, calendar Q3 2014 as well as the whole fiscal year of 2014 which ends in the calendar third quarter of every year. Qualcomm reported profits of $1.89 billion on $6.69 billion in revenue which boils down to an EPS of $1.11. Qualcomm’s revenues were up 3% year over year and down 2% from the last quarter, which worries some investors. Additionally, Qualcomm’s profit was up 26% year over year, but down 15% from the previous quarter.

However, Qualcomm’s quarterly figures missed on both revenue and non-GAAP EPS based on analysts’ expectations. Analysts had a consensus prediction of $1.31 EPS, which Qualcomm missed by $0.05 and they had a revenue target of $7.03 billion, and Qualcomm missed on that as well by $330 million.

Qualcomm also reported their results for the whole fiscal 2014 year, which showed the company as reporting $26.49 billion in revenue and a non-GAAP EPS of $5.27 while shippin 861 million MSM chips globally, an absolutely crazy number of SoCs. And if you take into account that

The primary problems that Qualcomm has right now is that they have a very strong position in the mobile market and are the leading SoC and baseband vendor for almost all of the leading smartphone vendors. In many regions, this has made Qualcomm very profitable and helped them grow to the $26 billion a year company that they are. They also managed to generate $8 billion in profit over the course of the last year, which is up from $6.8 billion in the previous fiscal year, a pretty significant improvement by any measure.

However, Qualcomm’s situation in China appears to be worsening rather than improving. They have plenty of products and IP that Chinese OEMs wish to utilize in their products, but are having a hard time getting them to properly license those technologies and pay for/accurately report how many Qualcomm licensed devices they are shipping and for how much. Additionally, Qualcomm is being probed by the Chinese government for the very reason that they are not Chinese and they are very present in the Chinese market. This very likely has to do with the fact that many large western companies have been probed in China recently and is a mere political move by the Chinese government to get more foreign technological investment.

Qualcomm’s outlook for the fiscal year of 2015 is what really drove Qualcomm’s stock downward today on yesterday’s news, with the company expecting revenues of $26.8 billion to $28.8 billion and an EPS of $5.05 to $5.35 which is below the consensus estimates of $28.9B and $5.58. The stock fell a whopping 8.5% today in regular trading after losing 6% in after hours trading yesterday and continues to lose ground into after hours trading, slipping an additional 2%. At the time of publication, Qualcomm’s stock is at $69.19 which is significantly lower than the $77 it was trading at before earnings were announced yesterday. As we learned in the case of Samsung, and now Qualcomm, nobody is invincible.

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Qualcomm just announced their earnings for the fiscal third quarter of 2014 which includes the calendar second quarter of 2014, and their earnings were strong as ever. Qualcomm reported $2.24 billion in profit on $6.81 billion in revenues, this represents a 9 percent growth in revenue year over year as well as a 7 percent growth over the previous quarter. Profits also grew a whopping 42 percent year over year and 14 percent sequentially, squashing investors’ worries that Qualcomm’s caution last year about flatter revenues might affect profitability. Diluted EPS was $1.31, up 46 percent year over year and 15 percent sequentially. These earnings figures can most likely be attributed to Qualcomm’s absolute dominance of the high-end and mid-range Android market where their Snapdragon 801 chip won design wins in all of the most sought after and best selling phones.

In fact, the Snapdragon 801 alone is in the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and the LG G3, all three of which are considered to be the best Android phones on the market today. In addition to those devices, the Xiaomi Mi4 and the OnePlus One also feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 chip. If you take this into account, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 chip absolutely dominates the competition and this is certainly helping Qualcomm to continue to drive growth.

Qualcomm also stated that they would be narrowing their guidance for the fiscal fourth quarter as well as the full fiscal year of 2014. This does not necessarily translate to a reduction in their expected revenue and profitability, but it does mean that their high end comes down a bit and their low end goes up. And the truth is, they usually hit somewhere between the midpoint and the high-end, which may cause some concern for some investors constantly expecting huge growth. They have guided the fiscal fourth quarter’s revenues to be $6.5 billion to $7.4 billion, flat to up 14 percent year over year as well as non-GAAP EPS at $1.20 to $1.35 up 14 to 29 percent year over year, a pretty decent improvement if you ask me. However, for that same quarter Qualcomm also cautioned that they expect to see a reduction in licensing revenues “to reflect some near-term challenges in China.”

For the whole year, though, Qualcomm has reaffirmed their guidance midpoint for revenue and narrowed the figures to $26.3 billion to $27.2 billion from the previous guidance of $26.0 billion and $27.5 billion, a total narrowing of $300 million. They raised their non-GAAP EPS guidance by $0.14 at the midpoint to $5.21 to $5.36 per share indicating a 16-19 percent growth year over year as opposed to the previous guidance of $5.05 to $5.25. Even so, Qualcomm’s shares are down a steep 3.49 percent in after hours trading on today’s earnings news, even though I suspect that it will likely be erased over the course of the earnings call, which should begin shortly. What is slightly bizarre, though, is that investors are dumping Qualcomm’s shares even though Broadcom just announced an exit from the baseband modem business, making Qualcomm’s business even stronger. However, Nvidia appears to be picking up some steam with their Tegra K1 mobile chip and could actually become some sort of a competitor against Qualcomm, especially since they still have their own applications processors and modems, and not many others do. Mediatek  could be a factor in the licensing business challenges, but Qualcomm hasn’t said anything yet that directly addresses that and we’ll have to see if they do during the call.

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Nvidia has been doing a lot of their own consumer products lately, with the original Shield handheld gaming console and the Tegra Note 7 tablet. Each of these devices was actually surprisingly good and they were very good values for the money, especially if you got them at their cheapest ($199 each). Nvidia has learned a lot of lessons from each device and they’ve done a fantastic job of updating both the Shield and the Tegra Note 7. Their updates are so frequent and regular that I almost feel like they’ve got the leg up on almost every other Android manufacturer out there. They are also some of the first if not the first to release a new version of the Android OS for their devices as it becomes available.

Nvidia Shield family

So, it comes as little surprise that Nvidia has today announced the Shield tablet, a converging device that combines the best of the Tegra Note 7 and the Shield portable gaming console into a portable gaming tablet. The Shield Tablet’s core innovation is that it sports a Tegra K1 SoC with a Kepler GPU inside rather than the previous generation Tegra 4 SoC, which was a few generations of GPU architecture behind. Tegra K1 promises to be vastly faster than anything Nvidia has ever made before and it will come in two CPU flavors with the first one being an ARM A15 implementation and the second being Nvidia’s own custom 64-bit CPU design.

The Nvidia Shield Tablet will have an 8″ Full HD IPS display capable of supporting DirectStylus 2 (an improvement over DirectStylus) and will feature a dual front-facing speaker setup much like the Tegra Note 7, but with a higher resolution because the Tegra Note 7 was only 720P and the Shield Tablet is 1080P. However, it will now have bass ports to allow for more bass to come from the speakers, a feature that many gamers will appreciate. It also has two 5MP cameras, one front and one back along with SmugMug’s Camera Awesome app built-into the phone. The tablet will support up to 128GB of SDXC memory card storage and wil come in a 16GB and 32GB versions with built-in memory. The 16GB variant of the Shield Tablet will be Wi-Fi only while the 32GB will support LTE on AT&T and T-Mobile through Nvidia’s Icera i500 modem. It will also have a 20 watt hour battery, which should suffice for about 8-10 hours of medium to light use and probably 5 hours or less of actual gaming.

Nvidia claims that the Shield Tablet will support 4K as it is “4K ready” however they are outputting the video for 4K over miniHDMI which is basically a dead standard in the mobile industry and hasn’t been used by anyone in a phone for a while. The fact that Nvidia chose to go with miniHDMI instead of MHL 3.0 is a perplexing one because with MHL 3.0 they can not only support 4K video streaming but they are also able to charge the device as it plays video back to the TV through the USB port.

The tablet will also feature Bluetooth 4.0 LE and 802.11n Wi-Fi, which is a bit of a disappointment like the Shield portable console was because in order to really get a solid gaming experience you really want to have something like 802.11ac. And yes, it will increase the overall cost of materials, but maybe Nvidia needs to develop their own because the lack of it in this tablet is almost unforgivable at this point.

Nvidia Shield Tablet Pricing

Nvidia will price the Shield Tablet at $299 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only model and $399 for the 32GB LTE model. They will also be selling a flip cover that will also double as a stand for the Shield Tablet as well as the Shield Controller which operates via Wi-Fi direct for $59. What makes this launch even more interesting is that the tablet will be available globally, the first time for any Nvidia Tegra consumer product. First the launch will begin on July 29th in the US (pre-order open today) and then Europe on August 14th and then the rest of the world this fall.

Overall, this tablet looks fairly promising as a standalone product, the real question will be how it will perform as a gaming tablet and whether or not people really want a separate tablet and game controller setup. I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to want to see if Nvidia releases a Shield portable gaming console with the Tegra K1 updated SoC inside. A gaming tablet is cool and all, but I just don’t see very many scenarios where carrying around a controller and a tablet is something a consumer would enjoy.

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Time Warner Cable is rolling out one of the fastest internet speeds available in the country today next month. Our sources have been indicating to us that Time Warner Cable has been in the process of rolling out a 200/300 Mbps service in the San Diego area. They already offer 100 Mbps to new customers, but many of those people will get upgraded to Time Warner Cable’s 300 Mbps service which is one of the fastest in the country. Keep in mind that this 300 Mbps service is still only over cable, so it can’t compete with Google’s 1 Gbps fiber service or the uploads that it or any fiber service can offer. But even so, moving from a 50/5 Mbps plan to a 300/20 Mbps plan for exactly the same price, nobody is going to complain about that. Additionally, this could be yet another one of Time Warner Cable’s justifications that a Comcast merger is okay because they are upgrading customers and not remaining stagnant. All of this will also help Time Warner Cable pump up their image in the eyes of the FCC who sees very little progress in terms of ISPs improving their speeds even though customers keep paying for faster and faster speeds by moving up through more expensive tiers.

As it stands right now, Time Warner Cable offers Ultimate 100 Mbps service for $64.99, Extreme 30 Mbps service for $54.99 a month, Turbo 20 Mbps service for $44.99 a month and Standard service for $34.99 a month. There’s also Basic at 3 Mbps for $29.99 a month and Everyday Low Price 2 Mbps for $14.99 a month. If you look at the current price structure, Time Warner Cable’s pricing only really makes sense at the high end with a 3x increase in speed costing you only $10 a month more.

However, with the new speed structures Ultimate customers will be getting 300/20 Mbps for $64.99 a month while Extreme customers will pay $54.99 a month for 200/20 Mbps speeds. We don’t know what will happen to the lower tiers, but I would expect that the Turbo customers may actually see 100 Mbps depending on what kind of a modem they have. Below that, I would expect to see Standard probably get upgraded to 30 Mbps, effectively doubling the speeds and we’d probably see basic come up to 10 Mbps to satisfy what will likely be a modified definition of Broadband by the FCC.

Time Warner Cable 300 Mbps modem compatibility

However, in order to get these 200 Mbps and 300 Mbps speeds from Time Warner Cable users will have to upgrade from their current models to the currently unavailable. The only modem that Time Warner Cable currently has on their approved list is the Arris (formerly Motorola) Surfboard SB6183. This modem is capable of 16×4 bonded channels which means it can do a maximum of 600 Mbps download and about 150 Mbps upload (theoretically). However, realistically users on Time Warner Cable will expect to see speeds of 300/20 Mbps download/upload with this modem. It has also been incredibly difficult to find any of these modems anywhere and the only place I saw any of them for sale was on eBay and surprisingly it was sold from someone in San Diego, likely testing out this new service in the area.

Needless to say, we’re very excited for this service to roll out over the course of the next month and will hopefully swap out our current SB6580 for one of these since we only use it in bridge mode as it is already as many users that have TWC’s Ultimate tier of service already do. However, if you don’t want to go out and get this modem, you should be able to still get 100 Mbps from Time Warner Cable’s service with nearly all of their approved modems.

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Early last week, Broadcom announced  that they would be looking to offload their cellular modem division or simply shutter operations. This announcement came as a surprise to many because the company had only recently acquired Rensas Mobile’s modem division (acquired from Nokia). This was done after Renesas Mobile was talking about shutting down the division entirely due to being unable to compete with the likes of Qualcomm and Infineon. Broadcom ‘saved’ Renesas Mobile’s modem division (mostly based in Finland) back in September of 2013, which completed in October of that same year with a final purchase price of $164 million.

Now, Broadcom already had fairly significant wireless modem patents for 2G and 3G technologies, but was severely weak in the 4G and beyond areas. As a result, they lost a lot of design wins and have struggled to integrate Renesas Mobile’s technologies into their own product stack. When we met with them at Mobile World Congress, a lot of the Cat 6 LTE demos equipment that they were showing still had Renesas Mobile stickers on it. But clearly, Broadcom and Renesas Mobile’s modem division were starting to meld together. That is why it seems far too soon to already be looking to offload the entire division, without even really trying.

In our conversations with Broadcom’s cellular modem division, they clearly seemed focused on delivering an affordable mainstream option with 3G and 4G technologies. However, delivering these technologies to the mainstream is incredibly competitive and very low margin, which is why investors applauded the management’s decision last week. Since the announcement, Broadcom’s stock is up nearly 20% or over $6.

What does this all mean? Well, it means that some companies that are looking to strengthen their modem offerings likely have a nice little package to pickup themselves. After all, right now there aren’t many modem companies left, let alone ones that can be acquired neatly without buying the rest of the company. Back in Q3 of 2013, there were only a few major cellular modem chip suppliers with Strategy Analytics estimating that Qualcomm, MediaTek, Intel, Spreadtrum, and Broadcom represented the top 5 market share spots. Qualcomm maintained its dominance with 66 percent revenue share, followed by MediaTek with 12 percent revenue share and Intel with 7 percent revenue share. Interestingly enough, the report continued to state that Broadcom was one of the few companies that had the potential to compete with Qualcomm on the mainstream LTE market (because of their acquisition) if they executed correctly and that 2014 would be an important year. However, that all appears to now be irrelevant since the company has effectively given up.

What this does mean, however, is that Intel, Mediatek or Nvidia could potentially step in and buy out Broadcom’s cellular baseband division to give themselves a more competitive spot in the market. Nvidia has struggled quite a bit with their acquisition of Icera, which hasn’t quite panned out well for them with their only significant modem design win being in the Microsoft Surface. They have struggled to get any design wins with the Tegra 4i, their first integrated modem product, and also struggled to get major smartphone design wins with their Tegra 4 SoC (without a cellular modem). Others say that Nvidia may just throw in the towel like Broadcom, but the truth is that there’s a good place for Nvidia if they can compete with Mediatek and Qualcomm, even just a little bit. I believe Nvidia is more steadfast than that, plus it is important for their automotive division to have cellular modem IP in order to be able to sell a whole solution to their customers.

Other potential suitors for Broadcom’s cellular modem division include Samsung, who was reportedly one of the parties interested in the Renesas Mobile acquisition back in 2013, but got beat out by Broadcom. Samsung already has their own applications processors and I’m sure would love to come out from under the grip of Qualcomm, if they could. Samsung already has their own applications processors and have experimented with their own cellular  modems in the past, but have done little since then but mix Qualcomm and Intel cellular modems. The same goes for Apple, who currently are an almost exclusive Qualcomm cellular modem buyer, but are rumored to be looking at their own cellular modem technologies as well.

Any of the above companies could be a potential suitor for Broadcom’s wireless division, and if a company like AMD wasn’t already so cash strapped, it could be a potential boon to their wireless business if they wanted to gain some momentum. However, they are simply too thinly spread and couldn’t afford to buy Broadcom’s entire cellular division like a Samsung, Nvidia or Apple could.

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Held in the New York City-sized, yet younger than many of us, Shenzhen metropolis, the last weeks’ IDF provided quite a number of announcements which you can anyway read on the usual press release reprinting web sites. Here’s something that you might not find that easily, though…

During my walkabout IDF Shenzhen tours, I had a chat with one high end OEM who was twice evaluating a 2-in-1 very high end LTE enabled Haswell ultrabook & tablet combo device with a built-in full LTE capability and the integrated pop-up SIM card slot. After all, if having a local LTE SIM card, you are far more ‘truly mobile and connected’ than if depending on the WiFi hotspot or nearest cable Ethernet outlet.

But voila, there was the problem: the engineering honcho of the company, present there, said that the obstacle was that, for the current LTE, Qualcomm charges a royalty of a whopping 5% of the product sales price just for having the LTE in-built capability, irrespective of whose LTE hardware is used inside (as long as it licenses their IP). For a $500 high end phone, that may still make borderline sense, but for a $1,500 top of the line ultrabook/tablet? No way, Jose… so only 3G SIM was left in in some of their mainstream notebook models, while anything better will have to wait for ‘5G’ generation with a different set of licensing rules. In the meantime, the ‘dongles’ are also solution as, well, 5% of a dongle cost is far less to cover, isn’t it?

We spoke to Qualcomm on the topic and got confirmation via a document that they, “… license our entire portfolio to licensees for just less than 5% of the wholesale selling price of the device. For complete, end user subscriber devices that implement LTE standards but do not implement any 3G CDMA standards, we charge approximately 3.25% of the wholesale selling price of each device, subject to reciprocity and other standard terms and conditions.” This ultimately breaks down to anywhere between $50-$200 depending on the price of the laptop, which means a huge loss of margin for PC makers, many of whom are already operating on razor thin margins.

But the next question here starts to become, where’s Intel in all of this and has their past failure to deliver competitive solutions forced OEMs to be stuck with Qualcomm or licensing Qualcomm IP? Are companies really being forced to use single-mode LTE devices like Altair’s solutions which ultimately provide no backup connection where 4G LTE coverage isn’t available?

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Qualcomm has been fairly quiet about their high-end ambitions after what is expected to follow the soon-to-launch Snapdragon 805 chipset. The Snapdragon 805 is Qualcomm’s chip that will likely ship in devices next quarter and is marketed by Qualcomm as their 4K chip with the Adreno 420 GPU.

Now, even though the Snapdragon 805 (APQ8084) is a very powerful chip, it lacks 64-bit capability and doesn’t have an integrated modem, requiring a separate modem like Qualcomm’s 20nm MDM9x35 to enable cellular capability. It also sports an improved Krait CPU with a Krait 450 CPU compared to the Snapdragon 801 and 800’s Krait 400. However, it still doesn’t quite satisfy Qualcomm’s need for a very powerful chip that looks into the future. The Snapdragon 805 is the chip for now.

That leads us to today’s announcement of the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 chips. The Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 mark the first time that Qualcomm has ever announced a high-end 64-bit chip and the first time they have implemented ARM’s own cores into their SOC. Both the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 will feature ARM’s A57 and A53 64-bit cores with the Snapdragon 810 being a 4 big + 4 LITTLE and the 808 being 2 big + 4 LITTLE in a big.LITTLE configuration. This marks a pretty big shift in the company’s attitude towards big.LITTLE when you consider that they were saying that their cores were good enough that they didn’t need to do a big.LITTLE configuration. And the fact that Qualcomm now has a high-end SoC that supports the ARMv8 64-bit instruction set architecture. Keeping in mind that they are already shipping the Snapdragon 410 to the middle of the market with an A53-based 64-bit CPU.

To me, and many others, it seemed like Qualcomm was poo pooing what Samsung and others were doing, and now they’re effectively doing the same with these two chips’ CPU cores. However, Qualcomm explained that they were reacting to market demand for 64-bit capable chips and that they wanted to deliver them to their customers as requested. They said that because their own custom 64-bit ARM CPU cores weren’t necessarily timed for what the market has demanded, they have adjusted and are delivering a 64-bit solution as quickly and effectively as they can with ARM’s cores. This can all be traced back to Apple’s release of the A7 64-bit chip in the iPhone 5S and how much they fundamentally shook the foundations of the mobile SoC world and what people were demanding.

In addition to the 64-bit ARM A57 and A53 cores, Qualcomm is integrating their modem directly into the SoC’s die, bringing the SoC and modem into one chip once again. Because they are integrating their 20nm MDM9x35 chip, they already know what they can expect to see from the modem side of things in terms of performance and power savings. Additionally, because Qualcomm has been working on 20nm with their modem, they could proof and tweak the process in anticipation for these Snapdragon chips. Because they both share the same modem, they will both be capable of Cat 6 LTE enabling LTE Advanced features globally with a single design. When paired with Qualcomm’s RF360 front-end solution, both chips will be capable of 3×20 MHz Carrier Aggregation, resulting in up to 300 Mbps download speeds in various spectrum scenarios.

The Snapdragon 810 will also be one of Qualcomm’s 4K-focused chips with the introduction of a 4K HEVC hardware video encoder as well as a 14-bit dual ISP (image signal processor) capable of 1.2 GP/s and supporting image sensors up to 55 MP. And because Qualcomm wants to focus on 4K so heavily with the Snapdragon 810, they once again bumped the GPU to an Adreno 430 which should bring 30% faster graphics performance when compared to the Adreno 420 in the Snapdragon 805. They also took a very serious look at the GPGPU compute capability of the Adreno chip and improved it by 100% all while reducing power consumption by 20% when compared to its predecessor. The Adreno 430 will also support OpenGL ES 3.1 which was recently announced as a standard, even though I suspect many of their currently available OpenGL ES 3.0 capable hardware could be updated to 3.1 via driver update as well. In addition to OpenGL ES 3.1 support, the Adreno 430 will also support hardware tessellation, geometry shaders and programmable blending. The Snapdragon 810 also will be Qualcomm’s first SoC to support LPDDR4 memory which means better performance and lower power consumption for high-end devices utilizing this SoC.

One of my biggest complaints about many SoC vendors as they’ve started to try to attach themselves to 4K is the fact that none of these GPUs, no matter how powerful, are capable of 3D graphics in 4K. The amount of horsepower it takes to do 3d graphics in 4K is absolutely insane and is far outside of the realm of these mobile SoCs, for now. As such, we were given clarification that most gaming in 4K on these devices will be done at 1080P and upscaled to 4K on whatever display it’s being played on. So, whenever you hear 4K gaming being mentioned, that’s likely what you are going to be seeing, even though its really 1080P gaming being upscaled to 4K. After all, almost all of the mobile games are built for 720P or 1080P and not anything much higher.

In contrast to the Snapdragon 810, the Snapdragon 808 is a very similar chip to the Snapdragon 810 but it takes more of a smartphone focus rather than a 4K tablet one. Even though, either chip can be used for a smartphone or tablet, it would just be more cost prohibitive to put a Snapdragon 810 in a smartphone. The Snapdragon 808, as we stated earlier is a slightly differently configured chip with a dual ARM Cortex-A57 plus quad Cortex-A53 CPU configuration, so technically it’s a sexacore or hexacore chip rather than an octocore like the 810.

The Snapdragon 808 takes more of a focus on future smartphone resolutions with a targeted design for WQXGA resolution of 2560×1600 (close to the Oppo Find 7) even though that phone has a 2560×1440 resolution, it’s essentially the same resolution. It does, however, have an Adreno 418 GPU, which actually puts it below the Adreno 420 and Adreno 430 which are both targeted towards 4K resolutions. The Adreno 418 claims to deliver 20% faster 3d graphics than the Adreno 330 in the Snapdragon 800, giving a slight performance boost to smartphones even though they’ll be handling much higher resolutions. In fact, the 2560×1600 resolution is double the pixels of the current 1920×1080 on most smartphones, which in my eyes, should justify more than a 20% improvement over the current generation. The doubling of pixels is especially important when you consider exactly when this SoC is expected to be shipping in devices.

The Snapdragon 808 will also support 12-bit dual ISPs as opposed to the Snapdragon 810’s 14-bit dual ISPs, resulting in less performance available to the image sensors to utilize. It will also support LPDDR3 rather than LPDDR4 support in the Snapdragon 810.

Now, if you take into account the Snapdragon 810 platform as a whole, you would be looking at an 8-chip solution, assuming that you were to go with Qualcomm’s RF360 RF front-end (WTR 3925 and WTR 3905) as well as their PMICs (power management integrated circuits) and their 2×2 WLAN chip (QCA6174A) that enables 802.11ac and MU-MIMO. They also have an NFC chip (QCA1990) and an audio codec that round out their full Snapdragon 810 platform, which is if you want to go Qualcomm the whole way.

Based on what I see here, I would say that the Snapdragon 810 will likely be a pretty attractive part for many looking to win the spec wars against their competitors and that we’ll probably see it used in both phones and tablets. I say this primarily because of the fact that even though the Snapdragon 808 is a slightly dialed down version of the 810, I’m simply not convinced that it will be powerful enough to deliver a smooth experience at 2560×1600 and to enable what I’d expect to be upscaled gaming (in the short term). The Snapdragon 810 really looks to be a great part, but it will be interesting to see where it will fit in their stack once Qualcomm eventually shows off their own custom 64-bit CPU cores, the successor to Krait. Judging by Qualcomm’s own marketing they really seem to be focusing on the Snapdragon 810, and I can totally see why. I think we will see more devices launching with the 810 than we will with the 808, even though the 808 will be in a more affordable price range. A flagship chip is a for flagship devices and manufacturers want to make sure they are putting in the best possible at that time.

Both the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 are expected to be sampling in the second half of 2014 and shipping in devices in the first half of 2015.

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