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Qualcomm Snapdragon 820

Today, Qualcomm formally launched the Snapdragon 820, ending the slow baste of announcements of piecemeal revelations that we've received over the final few months. This SoC is arriving at a disquisitional time for Qualcomm. From 2012 to 2014, the company rose to control a meaning chunk of the smartphone SoC market place. By Q3 2014, Qualcomm was measured every bit property 42% of the market for personal mobile devices, as measured by Jon Peddie Research.

2015, however, brought fresh headwinds. The Snapdragon 810 was widely believed to take an overheating problem. The actual situation was more circuitous than that; at to the lowest degree some Snapdragon 810 devices weren't profiled properly and didn't manage their ain thermals well equally a result. Subsequently point iterations on the chip may also have improved the situation. Either way, Qualcomm took a serious revenue hit when Samsung opted to use its own silicon in the Galaxy S6 family, even overall Galaxy sales failed to meet expectations.

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Details! Or not. Click to overstate.

All of which is to say, Qualcomm needs this fleck to be a hit. The "Kryo" CPU core is a custom scrap congenital on Samsung's second-generation 14nm engineering science (14 LPP). Qualcomm is advert the CPU every bit offering upwardly to 2x functioning and 2x efficiency compared to previous generation parts, which is rather frustratingly vague. At a estimate, this refers to the chip'southward theoretical maximum burst performance for a very brusk period of time and its overall efficiency when measured at idle, or under specific workloads. Intel, AMD, and other vendors excel at this kind of particular argument — actual ability consumption improvements and operation boosts tend to be highly workload dependent. Qualcomm is encouraging the use of its DSP and GPU equally computation offloads to improve overall CPU efficiency.

Qualcomm does offering some additional color around overall ability consumption, though they don't disclose their test environments or conditions.

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Power consumption in "real-life" workloads.

While we don't know the criteria that Qualcomm used to arrive at these conclusions, the 65% of Snapdragon 801 power metric makes sense given what we know near estimated improvements for 14nm compared to TSMC'due south 28nm planar silicon. It'south notwithstanding sobering to note that this improvement arrives roughly iii years since Qualcomm appear the Snapdragon S4 family, which featured the then-new custom Krait CPU core. Even if we have Qualcomm at its word about the relative level of advancement in CPU functioning and power consumption, information technology's taken iii years and two node shrinks to evangelize the kind of improvements we used to see in 18 months and a single node shrink — and equally we've already noted, we fully look that Qualcomm's comeback claims will be situational, just every bit AMD's and Intel'due south are. "Real-life" workloads simply vary as well much to be easily captured in a single metric.

Qualcomm's Tim McDonough took to Twitter to reply questions almost the new chip, but he kept his answers light. Qualcomm claims more than 60 device wins for the new 820 SOC, including cameras, cars, and drones. Nvidia has been the SoC manufacturer making noise about the automotive concern of late, so this could imply that QC wants to challenge NV on turf Team Green is hoping to stake out for itself.

Without much physical item on Kryo, nosotros're forced to brand some educated guesses virtually the core. Qualcomm has already revealed that the flake is targeting a 2.2GHz clock frequency. The Exynos 7420, built on Samsung's 14nm LPE process, uses a one.5GHz frequency base and a 2.1GHz heave clock. What'due south interesting to me is that Qualcomm has walked back the 810's commitment to a big.Little approach and instead opted for a single unified processor cake. This suggests that the Kryo CPU may emphasize instructions-per-cycle efficiency over clock speed.

Our estimate is that Qualcomm has staked out a midpoint betwixt Apple's A9 processor, which tends to pound the rest of the ARM family when it comes to unmarried-thread performance, and scaling up to viii or more cores, the fashion Samsung and companies similar MediaTek program to do. A college-efficiency quad-cadre may represent the sweet spot between these 2 extremes. Presumably, Qualcomm is using DVFS to control its clock frequencies and power gating, though there'due south always an outside chance that it adopted a technique like the AVFS AMD is using for Carrizo.

Putting it all together

Qualcomm's comprehensive spec sheet on the Snapdragon 820 is shown below. The company is challenge a bevy of improvements for its Adreno 530 GPU (up to 40% more operation and 40% greater ability efficiency than previous-generation hardware), new hardware decode and encode engines, an X12-class modem, and a variety of enhancements to image processing and security.

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The full spec sheet. Click to enlarge.

We've also heard tell that while Qualcomm's SoC design for its upcoming server family unit is quite different from Snapdragon 820, the CPU may derive from Kryo. This makes sense, if truthful — edifice a mutual compages and leveraging it beyond multiple contexts is how both AMD and Intel take historically done things, to good effect (Bulldozer notwithstanding). If Qualcomm is serious virtually competing in the server marketplace, it volition want to leverage economies of scale.

If the Snapdragon 820 does well, nosotros'll see that reflected in telephone blueprint wins at CES and Mobile World Congress in early on 2016. The Snapdragon 810 may not have won the accolades that the Snapdragon 800 family received, but the 808 and 810 combined have sold well and shipped in a number of high-contour designs. At the aforementioned time, withal, Qualcomm faces increased competition from mainland Chinese and lower-cost Taiwanese companies. Information technology needs the Snapdragon 820 to sell well if information technology wants to retain its de facto leadership of the Android market — a position Samsung arguably usurped with its own Exynos 7420 in 2015.

Devices based on the Snapdragon 820 are expected to ship in the start half of next yr, probably starting in March or April.