CES is almost here, and while most of the industry's biggest names (Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among others) either hold their biggest announcements for separate events or decline to show up at all, there's still plenty that happens there. It remains an important show for chipmakers and component suppliers, the companies making the stuff that's going to show up in the year's biggest gadgets. One of those companies is Qualcomm, and its flagship going into next year is the Snapdragon 810.

This chip was announced back in April, but chips are usually in development for at least a couple of years—the 810 will replace the current 805 in the first flagships of 2015. We spent an hour with Qualcomm yesterday hearing more about what phones based on the 810 will be able to do. The presentations were light on speeds and feeds and availability dates, but we'll give you all the information we have now ahead of further announcements at CES next month.

Tech specs

Here's what's going on with the Snapdragon 810: Qualcomm is switching away from its own custom-designed "Krait" CPU architecture that it has used in all its flagship chips since the Snapdragon S4 came out in 2012. Instead, it's using off-the-shelf CPU designs from ARM, namely the 64-bit Cortex A57 and A53. There will be four of each core in the 810 for a total of eight—ARM calls this arrangement "big.LITTLE" and the thinking is that the faster Cortex A57 cores will do the heavy lifting while the A53 cores take over for lighter tasks to save power. All eight cores are technically capable of being active at the same time, though there aren't many mobile apps that are going to use that many threads at once. We don't know exactly how well Cortex A57 will perform, and Qualcomm isn't talking about clock speeds or any of that stuff just yet.

The 64-bit-ness is probably more important than performance, at least for the purposes of marketing and perceived parity with Apple and iOS—it would explain why Qualcomm would dump a custom architecture that it surely spent many years and many millions of dollars developing. We'd expect to see Krait come back at some point in the next year or two, but assuming that Qualcomm didn't have 64-bit designs in development when Apple dropped the A7 on the mobile industry last year, switching to ARM designs makes the most sense in the short term.

Qualcomm sticks with its homemade Adreno GPUs on the graphics side. Qualcomm says the new Adreno 430 GPU should be around 30 percent faster than the Adreno 420 in the Snapdragon 805 while consuming 20 percent less power. The Adreno 400 series supports the same graphics and GPGPU APIs, including DirectX 11.2, OpenCL 1.2, and OpenGL ES 3.1. The 430 supports the same 3840×2160 maximum resolution as the 420—Qualcomm fully expects 4K screens to become common in tablets next year, and the Snapdragon 810 reference tablets it had on hand all used 4K screens.

That said, we'd caution you against getting swept up in the 4K hype machine that's going to be running full-throttle at CES. There may be benefits for large TV sets, especially as 4K content slowly becomes more common, but measured against 2560×1600 or 2048×1536 screens, the improvements are minor and unlikely to be noticed by most people.

On the wireless side, the 810 continues to support 802.11ac and introduces Category 9 LTE support, which increases the maximum theoretical download speed to 450Mbps (upload speeds remain the same at 50Mbps). The 810 will also be the first of Qualcomm's chips to include support for "WiGig," also called 802.11ad—this new kind of wireless uses the 60GHz band rather than the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands used by current Wi-Fi, and it promises a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 7Gbps (Qualcomm's implementation promises 4Gbps, likely limited by the number of antennas that can be crammed into a mobile device).

Expect 802.11ad to augment rather than replace 5GHz Wi-Fi for now, though—its range is relatively limited, and its signals have trouble passing through walls or other obstructions. It's of more use in connecting home theater devices together—TVs, set-top boxes, phones, and tablets that all have line of sight and relatively little distance between them.

Finally, the 810 will be Qualcomm's first chip built on TSMC's new 20nm process, down from the various 28nm processes it has been using for a couple of years now. TSMC claims that a 28nm chip moved to the 20nm process will use about 25 percent less power, though of course chipmakers can also use that extra headroom to improve performance while keeping power consumption the same.

Other features

The other stuff Qualcomm played up in its presentation yesterday had less to do with the chip itself and more to do with the other hardware the chip is connected to.

For example, Qualcomm showed off a reference phone with a pair of cameras. Each of the lenses was fixed but had a different focal length—using images from each camera and some software magic, the phone was able to simulate optical zoom without actually making room for a zoom lens. This particular implementation was based on Corephotonics' dual camera setup, which was shown off at Mobile World Congress earlier this year.

If phones like this reference device or the HTC One M8 are any indication, we'll probably see more dual-lens setups like this in 2015. We're running up against the limits of what can be crammed into a cell phone, and one of the ways to add features and improve image quality is to just capture more image data and cobble it all together in post-processing. Some early iPhone rumors suggest that Apple is working on a similar solution of its own.

The last big feature of note is an OS-independent kill switch baked in at the hardware level. Legislators are already passing laws that will require smartphones to support remote data wiping and locking to deter both physical device theft and data theft. Android, iOS, and others all support this kind of feature in software, but Qualcomm's "Safeswitch" will add another layer of protection.

We can expect the Snapdragon 810 to show up in flagship phones and tablets early next year—expect the spring flagships from the likes of Samsung and HTC to be among the first to include it. Qualcomm's control of the high-end smartphone market is nearly absolute (excluding the iPhone, of course, though even those use Qualcomm modems and transceivers). If you're looking into replacing your phone next year, the 810 is a chip you'll run into soon.