At Mobile World Congress today, Qualcomm announced that it’s building a pair of new Snapdragon 600 devices to target the 64-bit market. The first chip, the Snapdragon 610, is a quad-core design based on ARM’s Cortex-A53, while the second chip is an octa-core product based around the same ARM core. This is something of a departure for Qualcomm’s usual MO. In the past, the firm was openly scornful of MediaTek’s octa-core claims, and it typically leads with its own architectures as opposed to a standard ARM CPU core.

Like the standard members of the Snapdragon 800 and 600 family, these devices will rely on Qualcomm’s 28nm LTE modem for communication, but they’ll also include a new GPU variant based on the Adreno 420 GPU. Right now, the highest-end Snapdragon 800 devices currently on the market ship with an Adreno 330 GPU. While capable, the Adreno family has generally been an extension of the work AMD did back in 2006 – 2008, with the highest-end parts topping out with DirectX 9.0c or feature level DirectX 9_3 support. Now, Qualcomm is taking the plunge into DirectX 11 territory.

The Snapdragon 805, as the highest-end SoC, will use the Adreno 420 GPU, but these new 600-series cores will have a variant of the same technology, dubbed the Adreno 405. Qualcomm’s PR brief makes note of full OpenCL support “for superior GPGPU compute, video, and image processing” with a video engine that can handle up to 2560×1600 displays. The new block also contains a hardware H.265 encoder, which puts Qualcomm out in front as far as shipping a baked-in decoder product.

Here we go again

These product announcements are a bit of a mixed bundle. On the one hand, Qualcomm’s new GPU core is exciting, as is the H.265 decoder capability. The value of moving to 64-bit for Android devices could be a solid performance gain, as it was for Apple, or could wind up being a sideways shift depending on vendor support and application compatibility, but the move to eight-core phones isn’t automatically a positive.

One of the frustrating things about the push for increasingly parallel devices is that it’s relatively easy to cook up benchmarks that show (or purport to show) the performance gains of a multi-threaded processor. The more cores we add, however, the more difficult it becomes to ensure that those gains carry over into the real world. Given that the Cortex-A53 is a low-power core designed as an evolution of the Cortex-A7, there’s good question as to whether or not an eight-core version will present a real benefit compared to quad-core variants of higher-end architectures.

Fortunately, the overall performance characteristics of the chip should still be strong enough to make it a solid midrange product, particularly when combined with the higher-end GPU. Qualcomm expects that we’ll see these products in consumer devices by Q4 2014. For now, the company’s 20nm radio technology looks to be confined to the premium Snapdragon 800 part — buyers who want to maximize power efficiency and battery life may have to choose between a midrange CPU core and an ultra-efficient 20nm modem in high-end devices.

One final note: while Qualcomm is a member of the HSA Foundation and the Adreno 405 GPU is listed as OpenCL-compatible, I’m mentioning this here because there seems to be some confusion about what it means to have GPGPU support, particularly when a company is part of the HSA foundation. To the best of our knowledge, AMD is the only company with an HSA-capable chip arriving in 2014 — no other company has announced support and the current ARM interconnects (CCN-504 and CCN-508) aren’t HSA-compatible.