Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 801 processor is a slightly faster version of last year’s Snapdragon 801 chip, and it’ll likely be one of the company’s fastest chips until the Snapdragon 805 arrives.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2 smartphones both feature Snapdragon 801 chips… but they run at different speeds. As AnandTech explains, that’s because there are actually 3 different versions of Qualcomm’s latest processor.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 801

All three variants of the Snapdragon 801 are based on new v3 architecture which replaces the Snapdragon 800’s v2 design.

One of the biggest changes is that all of the new chips support eMMC 5.0 which allows for faster built-in storage cards. They also support phones with dual SIM cards.

It’s also possible to run the CPU and GPU at higher clock speeds… but not all Snapdragon 801 variants have higher clock speeds than Snapdragon 801 chips.

The highest-performance Snapdragon 801 has a top CPU speed of 2.5 GHz and top GPU speed of 578 MHz. But the slowest has a CPU clocked at 2.3 GHz and GPU clocked at 450 MHz, which are the same speeds as the middle-tier Snapdragon 800 CPU.

Paired with faster storage, the new chip could still enable faster performance. But it turns out the math is a bit more complicated than simply picking the chip with a higher model number.

You can find more details at AnandTech.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 and 801
Credit: AnandTech

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