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Qualcomm Announces Next-Gen Snapdragon 808 and 810 SoCs
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Qualcomm has announced two fundamentally new chips today with updated CPU cores as well as Qualcomm's new Adreno 400-class GPU. The Snapdragon 808 and the Snapdragon 810 have been unveiled with a host of new architectural enhancements. The Snapdragon 810 will be the highest-end solution, with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 paired alongside four low-power Cortex-A53 cores.
The Snapdragon 808 will also use a big.Little design, but the core layouts will be asymmetric — two Cortex-A57's paired with four Cortex-A53's. The Cortex-A57 is, by all accounts, an extremely capable processor — which means a pair of them in a dual-core configuration should be more than capable of driving a high-end smartphone. Both SoC's will use a 20nm radio and a 28nm RF transceiver. That's a major step forward for Qualcomm (most RF today is built on 40nm). RF circuits typically lag behind digital logic by at least one process node. Given that RF currently accounts for some 15% of the total area and 30-40% of the PCB, the benefits of moving to a smaller manufacturing process for the RF circuit are significant." To clarify, the 810 can use a combination of the Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores so a single task that needs a lot of power won't cause as large of a power jump. All of the chips are 64-bit ARM too.
The Snapdragon 808 will also use a big.Little design, but the core layouts will be asymmetric — two Cortex-A57's paired with four Cortex-A53's. The Cortex-A57 is, by all accounts, an extremely capable processor — which means a pair of them in a dual-core configuration should be more than capable of driving a high-end smartphone. Both SoC's will use a 20nm radio and a 28nm RF transceiver. That's a major step forward for Qualcomm (most RF today is built on 40nm). RF circuits typically lag behind digital logic by at least one process node. Given that RF currently accounts for some 15% of the total area and 30-40% of the PCB, the benefits of moving to a smaller manufacturing process for the RF circuit are significant." To clarify, the 810 can use a combination of the Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores so a single task that needs a lot of power won't cause as large of a power jump. All of the chips are 64-bit ARM too.
So does this finally mean we'll get Simultaneous voice and LTE/SVDO back? Because all the current generation Qualcomm processors lack dual radio paths for some reason, this despite the fact that the previous generation had it. I have to assume it's because they used so much power/transistor budget on 'more cores!!!!' that they didn't have room for an RF design to accommodate features that are actually useful.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"I know there's a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7. I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that," -Anand Chandrasekher, former Qualcomm CMO
I can't see how wasting cycles on implanting an x86/x64 instruction set would be of much use commercially. I don't get the impression that many ARM manufacturers have any interest in trying to beat Intel on its own platform.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Now that one person is doing it, everyone is going to have to do it. It's going to be difficult selling a 32-bit processor when the guy across the street is selling a 64-bit one.
There's a lot more reason to go 64 bit than that. The biggest is that it's not going to be long before smartphones and tablets have > 3 GiB RAM. Yeah, there are all sorts of workarounds you can use to access larger amounts of RAM with 32-bit pointers, but it's much nicer to have a flat address space, including plenty of address space for memory-mapped devices. Granted that we're probably a couple of years away from needing 64 bits, but it's coming, fast.
32-bit ARM already addresses more than 32 bits: recent 32 bit ARM architectures have a 48 bit address space, and several chips support 36 or 40 bits. The problem of individual applications addressing at most 32 bits is minor, at this stage, but sooner or later we will have big graphics editing applications on Tablets, and larger address spaces help.
The main advantage that Aarch64 has at this very moment is that it offers a more streamlined instruction set (that makes instructions easier to reorder) and more registers. Even just compiling 32 bit code in the new model you can get impressive performance gains.
Roberto