[citation][nom]yelped[/nom]If you pay close attention, this is NOT the same Snapdragon that was used in the older phones. The model used in these phones, even the 800Mhz one, outperforms the old 1Ghz Snapdragons. Not to mention, that these use the new Adreno 205 GPU which is about 4 times faster than the old Adreno 200 used in the previous Snapdragon iterations, making it almost matching the Samsung Hummingbird in speed. This is what I understand from other news posts.[/citation]
I said it was "basically" the same CPU (Qualcomm refers to both as the "Scorpion" CPU). Very little was done to enhance the performance of the CPU part of the package. It's possibly slightly faster, but it's not like an entirely new generation by far.
The GPU is indeed faster (41 million tri/s), but not as fast the Hummingbird's GPU (90mi). But without tactile controls, playing 3D games on a touch screen isn't exactly ideal, which is probably why there are very few such games in the Market.
It's a stopgap filler SoC, and one you really should skip unless you absolutely need a phone now. The HD is not a bad phone, and the 45nm process should help extend battery life (although HTC cut the capacity from 1400 mAh to 1230 mAh).
The truly next generation phones will feature dual 1.5 GHz cores (theoretically three times the performance of the Desire HD), and the performance of the GPU will once again be doubled to 88M tri/s. Such phones will probably ship with 1 to 1.5GB of RAM (keeping more cores and a faster GPU fed with data requires more RAM). Unfortunately, they will probably be too late for the fall/xmas shopping season.