Qualcomm used this year’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona to announce a new set of mid-range Snapdragon processors, the 610 and 615 which are set to bring 64-bit computing capability to even more smartphones in 2014.

The 610 and 615 follow the only other 64-bit processor from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 410, which was announced last year. The 610 is a quad core chip but the Snapdragon 615 is the first ever octa core chip from Qualcomm.

All eight cores are ARMs Cortex A53 design, which means it won’t be using the big.Little architecture that pairs them with four much higher powered A57 cores which Qualcomm has said was a much better way for them to build an eight core processor. The cores will be divided into two separate clusters of four with one operating at a lower frequency to handle menial tasks while the other will be at a higher frequency if needed. All eight cores can clock up to the higher frequencies if that kind of power is ever needed.

Both the 610 and the 615 will have newer, and more powerful, graphics cores than the Snapdragon 410 which will allow them to run much higher resolution displays. Importantly, because all three chips have been designed to have the same pin configuration one smartphone can have three different versions, with different processing capabilities with only one component changing meaning prices can come down even further.

The Snapdragon 410 was aimed at phone in the $150 (R1 500) range but the 610 and 615 will more than likely find their home in the $250-$350 (R2 500 – R3 500) range.

As expected from this year’s show the talk from the Android smartphone community around getting 64-bit processors in phones has begun. It’s as a direct result of Apple making the switch to 64-bit processors with its new A7 chip that appears in the iPhone 5s and the new iPads.

While the Android operating system itself has not yet been updated t take advantage of the additional performance capabilities that 64-bit processors could unlock, the development is no doubt under way already for  the shift to happen, perhaps as early as June at Google’s annual I/O conference.

The other big news is from Sunday’s Microsoft announcement was that the Qualcomm Reference Design program is now available for Windows Phone 8 and that the Snapdragon 400 and 600 chips are now supported as well. In other words, expect to see a host of new smartphones with all three of the 64-bit Qualcomm chips running Windows phone 8 and Android in 2014.