At its IFA press conference in Berlin, HTC has just announced its latest Desire handset with an octa-core 64-bit chip from Qualcomm — the Desire 820.

The Desire 820 is the first handset to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615 chip — which consists of four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1GHz for a perfect balance between power and battery life.

Besides the bump in processing power, the handset is similar to the Desire 816 in most ways. Even the design is largely reminiscent of its predecessor with HTC only adding a dash of red around the edges of the device and its camera lens to spice things up a bit, which HTC is calling the double shot color technology.

While the handset runs on Android 4.4 KitKat, HTC has promised that the device will be updated to Android L down the line, which will be optimized to take advantage of the 64-bit processor ticking inside it.

The full specs of the handset are as follows:

• 5.5-inch 720p S-LCD3 display
• Snapdragon 615 Octa-core SoC
• Adreno 405 GPU
• 1.5GB RAM
• 16GB internal storage
• microSD card slot
• 13MP F/2.2 rear camera
• 8MP front camera
• Front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers
• Cat. 4 LTE network support
• Android 4.4 KitKat
• Sense 6

The Desire 820 will be available towards the end of September with a dual-SIM variant being launched in selected markets as well. HTC will also be offering a Dot View like case for the Desire 820.