Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Processor Specs: Mass Production Begins in May, 2.3GHz Clock Speed

Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon 800 processor goes into mass production in May, and the first devices to utilize the top-of-the-line chipset should begin appearing in June.

The Snapdragon 600 is currently being used in high-end phones like the American version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. The 800 improves upon the 600 with Krait 400 architecture and a top clock speed of 2.3GHz.

"On top of that, the 800 comes with the new Adreno 330 graphics processor with 30fps 4K playback capability, while still featuring the improved Adreno 320's FlexRender technology that can dynamically switch between direct rendering and binning rendering for optimized performance and efficiency," Engadget writes.

No benchmarks are available yet, so there's no way to know if the Snapdragon 800 will outperform Samsung's eight-core Exynos 5 Octa processor. The Exynos 5 may have more cores, but it can only use four at a time, so the asynchronous quad-core Snapdragon 800 could end up being faster.

The Exynos 5 is definitely faster than the Snapdragon 600, from what we've seem in benchmark tests run on different versions of the Galaxy S4, so hopefully Qualcomm has some impressive new tech in store for the 800.

"Using TSMC's new 28nm HPm process (High-K + Metal Gate, optimized for low power at peak performance), Krait 400 can run at up to 2.3GHz. The 400 series core inherits all of the improvements from Krait 300 but adds a couple more," AnandTech writes of the Krait 400. The Snapdragon 600 uses the Krait 300 architecture. "The move to 28nm HPm necessitates a redesign of circuits and some relayout, but Qualcomm also improved the memory interface on the core. Krait 400 enjoys lower latency to main memory and a faster L2 cache."

No word on which phones or other devices will use the 800, but it's a fair bet most high-end Android phones, particularly non-Samsung devices, will want a Snapdragon 800 at the heart of their tech.