Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Pro processor has been blowing us away with its speed in phones like the Nexus 4 and HTC's Droid DNA, and that's why we can't wait to meet its big brothers. The Snapdragon 800 boasts a quad-core Krait 400 CPU, that can go up to 2.3GHz per core.


To put that in perspective, the base-level Retina MacBook Pros come with a 2.3GHz processor (though, obviously, there's a lot more to performance than clock-speed). In other words, things are about to get very fast.


The 800 also features and Adreno 330 GPU, which claims to offer a 2x graphics performance boost from the previous generation (the Adreno 320). It supports 2x32bit LPDDR3 RAM at 800MHz – with memory bandwidth of 12.8GBps. It will support UltraHD (a.k.a. 4K) playback and recording plus 7.1 Surround sound. Dual image signal processors support up to four cameras and allows for 3D captures, photo merging into a master 55 megapixel image. They claim all this, plus 4G LTE and 802.11ac Wi-Fi for faster downloads, and a boost in battery life. We can't wait to see how this stacks up to Nvidia's Tegra 4, with its nutty 72 GPU cores. We can expect to see the 800 start showing up in mobile devices in mid-2013.

There's also the Snapdragon 600. It uses a quad-core Krait 300 CPU running at up to 1.9 GHz, the Adreno 320 GPU, and LPDDR3 RAM. It may not be as burly as the 800, but it still sounds like an improvement over the current generation S4, and it also promises better battery life. We'll start seeing it appear in Q2 of 2013.

Not to gush, but seriously, phones are so awesome right now. [Qualcomm]