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Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 820 With Adreno 530 Graphics For Mobile Devices (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Qualcomm held an event in New York City today to demonstrate for the first time its highly anticipated Snapdragon 820 System-on-Chip (SoC). More than just a speed bump and refresh of the Snapdragon 810, Qualcomm says it designed the Snapdragon 820 "from the ground up to be unlike anything else." Behind that marketing spin is indeed an SoC with a custom 64-bit quad-core Kyro processor clocked at up to 2.2GHz. Qualcomm says it delivers up to twice the performance and twice the power efficiency of its predecessor, which is in fact an 8-core chip. Qualcomm officials have quoted 2x the performance of their previous gen Snapdragon 810 in single threaded throughput alone, which is a sizable gain. Efficiency is also being touted here, and according to Qualcomm, the improvements it made to the underlying architecture translate into nearly a third (30 percent) less power consumption. That should help the Snapdragon 820 steer clear of overheating concerns, which is something the 810 wasn't able to do.
I worked at Qualcomm for some 9 years over 2 sessions. Taking a standard ARM core and improving it was their secret sauce for years. They even made money selling their improvements back to ARM. But talking to friends who still work there, Qualcomm is using more standard ARM and adding less secret sauce.
Qualcomm is the best place I've ever worked for (37 years in the industry). My insiders tell me the QC I knew and loved was taken behind the barn and shot by Paul Jacobs, and it's nothing like what I remember. I hope they're wrong, but a couple of these guys have been there for 20+ years.