While most chip companies like to introduce new technologies into their high-end chips first and let them trickle down, Qualcomm has lately been taking the opposite approach with its Snapdragon chips. The company's first 64-bit chip with support for the new ARMv8 instruction set was the low-end Snapdragon 410, announced in December. At Mobile World Congress in February, Qualcomm announced the midrange Snapdragon 610 and 615. And today, the company is announcing the new Snapdragon 808 and 810, the two chips that will sit at the top of its lineup in 2015.

The Snapdragon 808 is the lower-end of the two chips. It combines two of ARM's high-end Cortex A57 CPUs with four low-end, low-power Cortex A53 CPUs in a big.LITTLE configuration—the big cores handle the heavy lifting while the smaller ones handle lighter tasks to conserve power. It includes an Adreno 418 GPU that will supposedly be about 20 percent faster than the Adreno 330 GPU in current Snapdragon 800 and 801 products.

The Snapdragon 810 will be the new flagship in the lineup, designed to support the upcoming 32-bit Snapdragon 805. It uses a total of eight CPU cores in a big.LITTLE configuration—four high-end Cortex A57 cores and four low-power Cortex A53 cores. Also included is a faster Adreno 430 GPU, which should be 30 percent faster and more power-efficient than the Adreno 420 GPU in the Snapdragon 805. Qualcomm's multitudinous model numbers make it a bit of a headache to compare the various Adreno GPUs directly, but you can work it out if you look at past releases: you'll get a 20 percent performance boost moving from the 330 to the 418 and a 40 percent boost moving from the 330 to the 420. If the 430 is 30 percent faster than that, some rough math suggests that the 430 will be around 82 percent faster than the 330.

Both the Snapdragon 808 and 810 will be built on a new 20nm manufacturing process, presumably from current manufacturing partner TSMC, and both will include new Qualcomm-designed Category 6 LTE modems. These modems will increase theoretical LTE download speeds to 300Mbps from the current Category 4 maximum of 150Mbps. Both also support 4K video output over HDMI as well as Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, and 802.11ac.

For the last two or so years, Qualcomm has steadily been moving away from using ARM's own architectures; most dual- and quad-core chips from the Snapdragon S4, Snapdragon 400, Snapdragon 600, and Snapdragon 800 families used the company's own custom "Krait" CPU architecture instead. With the Snapdragon 410, 610, and 810 families, Qualcomm's entire lineup for the end of 2014 and into 2015 will use ARM's Cortex CPU architectures instead. If we see a 64-bit, ARMv8 version of Krait, it's apparently not going to be this year.