Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 chip coming soon to Windows RT 8.1 devices

Qualcomm has announced today that their high-end Snapdragon 800 chipset will be shipping in Windows RT 8.1 devices "later this year", becoming the third chipset - alongside NVIDIA's Tegra 3 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 - that supports the platform. The Snapdragon 800 is the fastest ARM-based chip in Qualcomm's portfolio, combining four Krait 400 CPUs at up to 2.2 GHz alongside an Adreno 330 GPU and 3G/4G LTE radios.

Aside from speed improvements found in the Snapdragon 800's CPU, memory and GPU, the chip is also said to be more power efficient than Qualcomm's last-generation offerings. Also of note is the chipsets capability to drive displays up to a resolution of 2560 x 2048, which should allow Windows RT machines to feature high-resolution panels for the first time, while 4K encoding and decoding is also natively supported.

Luis Pineda, senior VP of product management, computing and consumer products at Qualcomm, said they are "excited to be supporting Windows RT 8.1 with our flagship Snapdragon 800 processors" and that the chip will bring "support for new Windows RT 8.1 features and services." Meanwhile, Mike Anguilo, Corporate VP of Planning and PC Ecosystem at Microsoft, said they "are excited to continue working with Qualcomm Technologies on the next iteration of Windows RT 8.1".