Something we didn’t see coming! Google subsidy Motorola announced at today’s Droid event that the new Droid Ultra, Droid Maxx, and Droid Mini smartphones would be powered by an in-house System-on-a-Chip (SoC). The new “X8” 8-core processor has a dual core CPU, a quad core GPU and a separate processor for “natural language processing” and it rounds out with computing core to control them all.

Brian Klug from Anandtech says that the CPU is a Qualcomm Snapdragon.

Motorola says this processor will double graphics speed and boost CPU by about 25%.

More importantly, it will allow these new phones to “always be listening” without draining the battery. Speaking of battery, did you hear that the new Droid Maxx has 48-hour battery life? Head over to the event roundup for all of the details.  Image via Verge