Retroid's Pocket Nova has a Qualcomm processor, but it's not a Snapdragon chip

After revealing the Pocket Nova's display specs and the available color options, Retroid has disclosed another important detail of the upcoming 4:3 handheld. The new info is the processor, which will determine how powerful the Pocket Nova is in relation to other devices.

Previous Retroid handhelds have either launched with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor or a MediaTek processor, and for the Pocket Nova, the tradition continues. According to a new post on its X account, the Pocket Nova will be powered by a Qualcomm chip. The processor in question is the Qualcomm QCS8550 a.k.a. Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS8550.

While the name might be unfamiliar, since most people are familiar with Qualcomm's Snapdragon line; the Qualcomm QCS8550 is a processor designed for IoT devices. According to its product page, it is a 4nm processor with 1x Kryo Gold cores clocked at 3.2GHz, 4x Kryo Gold cores clocked at 2.8GHz, and 3x Kryo Silver cores clocked at 2.0GHz. It also has support for LPDDR5X RAM and features an Adreno 740 GPU, a 48 TOPS NPU, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.3.

If those specs sound familiar, that is because they are the same as those of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, the chip inside the Retroid Pocket 6. However, since this is the IoT version of the processor which lacks a 5G modem, it goes by a different name — Qualcomm QCS8550.

A similar situation happened earlier this year with the AYN Odin 3 which was marketed as being powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite but was later corrected to the Qualcomm Dragonwing Q8, the IoT version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Retroid is yet to reveal how much RAM and storage the Pocket Nova will be available in. There's also no info on its price and launch date. However, based on the specs revealed so far, the Pocket Nova may not be a cheap handheld.