Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 810 and 808 this week, and the most revealing thing in the spec sheet is what is missing. There is no Krait in it. After three years of telling everyone that designing its own CPU core was the whole point, Qualcomm is shipping its next flagship with stock ARM cores, Cortex-A57 for performance and Cortex-A53 for efficiency, in a big.LITTLE arrangement. That is not the plan working. That is the plan getting interrupted, and the thing that interrupted it was a 64-bit chip in an iPhone. That’s also why I’m not big on ARM hegemony at this point.

Here is the chain of events, because Qualcomm will not say it this bluntly. Apple shipped the 64-bit A7 last fall. Every Krait core Qualcomm has is 32-bit, and a 64-bit Krait is not ready. So rather than cede the “ours goes to 64-bit too” headline for a full year, Qualcomm grabbed ARM’s off-the-shelf 64-bit cores, which are available now, and built the 810 and 808 around them. The press release even says, in the polite language these things use, that Qualcomm remains committed to its own custom 64-bit core down the road. Translation: this is the stopgap, the real one comes later. I respect the honesty of the engineering decision. I do not love what it implies about the timeline.

The 810 is the flagship part, four Cortex-A57 cores plus four Cortex-A53, an Adreno 430 GPU that Qualcomm pegs at roughly 30% over the Adreno 420, LPDDR4 memory, and the new Category 6 LTE modem good for 300 Mbps with three-carrier aggregation. It does H.265 encode and decode, drives 4K, and it is built on a 20nm process. The 808 is the slightly trimmed sibling, two A57s instead of four and the smaller Adreno 418, aimed at premium phones that do not need the full 810. On paper both are strong, and the 64-bit ARMv8 support means Android’s move to 64-bit has a flagship Qualcomm chip waiting for it, the proper successor to last year’s Snapdragon 800.

Now the part that actually decides whether these are good, and it is not on the spec sheet. The Cortex-A57 is a hot core. ARM’s own numbers have it drawing meaningfully more power than the A15 it replaces, and Qualcomm is putting four of them on a 20nm process that is brand new and, by every account I trust, not the most thermally forgiving node going. Qualcomm’s answer is that 20nm offsets the A57’s appetite. Maybe. I have watched enough launches to be skeptical of “the new node will save us” when the cores are this aggressive and the chassis is a 7mm phone with no room for a heatsink. These do not ship in devices until early next year, so nobody has cooked one yet. But if I were betting, I would bet the 810 runs hot under sustained load, and I would want to see a real phone throttle-tested before I called it a win. Ask me in six months.

Qualcomm is also pushing past the phone, which I think is the smarter long game. It announced the Snapdragon 602A for cars back at CES in January, the start of a serious automotive infotainment play, and the modem and connectivity portfolio keeps doing the quiet work that the CPU drama distracts from. The current flagships in stores, the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8 and Xperia Z2, all run the 801, a tuned-up version of the 800-tier Qualcomm introduced at CES 2013, and a 32-bit 805 is coming this summer as the last hurrah of Krait before the A57 parts take over. OPPO’s Find 7 with its QHD screen runs that 801 generation and shows how much headroom the old Krait still has.

I am leaving the mid-range 64-bit parts, the 410 and 610 and 615, for another day, because they are a cleaner story: small A53 cores on a forgiving node, exactly where stock ARM cores make sense. The flagship is the gamble. Qualcomm got caught 32-bit when Apple went 64, reached for ARM’s hottest cores to catch up fast, and is now hoping a young 20nm process keeps them in check. The 808 with two A57s might be the sleeper that actually behaves. The 810 is the one I would not preorder on faith.