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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.
Or is it just me?
Anyone else remember when Qualcomm used to make lawnmowers?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Damn phone still takes way too long to boot up. It's inexcusable. A system ROM should be up as soon as it gets power, with everything already in place. A TRS-80 running off cassettes was almost as fast as this bullshit, and it had networking too.
The key points to get from the graphs above are that for some reason the Snapdragon 800 SoC in the Nexus 5 only ends up using 3 of its 4 cores most of the time, with the frequency on the other three Krait 400 cores oscillating between 1GHz and 1.6GHz. The Snapdragon 805 in the Nexus 6 keeps all four cores at their max frequency for about twelve minutes before they all throttle down to 2GHz and remain there for nearly two hours. Meanwhile, Snapdragon 808 can only keep its two A57 cores at their peak frequency for two minutes before throttling both down to 633MHz and putting the A53s up to their peak 1.44GHz. After twelve minutes the A57s are just shut off entirely, and you're left with a cluster of 4 A53 cores at 1.44GHz. I didn't bother running this test as long as I did for Snapdragon 800 and 805 because the events at the two and twelve minute marks tell you everything you need to know.
Part of the blame is probably the 20 nm TSMC node that apparently had problems with leakage at higher voltages, but that's unlikely to be the only issue.
As we know, Apple uses its own A-series in the iPhones, iPads and iPods. What does Samsung use? That leaves Microsoft, which is one company that uses Qualcomm's processors. Anyone know what the Lumia 950 uses?
With these kinds of releases coming from hardware companies, what is the current bottleneck on mobile devices? Is it the actual wireless signal?
In my day from what I remember while building computers, first it was Ram, then everyone focused on the Front side bus, then hard drive connection, then graphic cards, I don't know where the heck it went from there. I gave up that endless rat race.
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.
"When combined, these two processors are designed to create amazingly realistic images that challenge people’s ability to tell the difference between a photo and a rendered image."
Does it also offer an enriched multimedia experience, and immersive technologies that enables a whole new world of mobile computing? Shut up.
Does that thing use a decently recent kernel or is it still that old 3.10 (or worse yet 3.4) seen on all ARM gadgets ?
I finally had to bite the bullet and give up Eudora earlier this year, because the changes to SSL/TLS by my email providers meant that Eudora could no longer set up an encrypted connection, because it couldn't handle 2048-bit keys. At least Thunderbird works better now than it did a few years back when I last evaluated it, so I use that on Windows. (Haven't found an IMAP client for Android tablets I really like, so I use webmail from there.)
My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac, over dialup, and it still works fine.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's a big improvement, but twice the performance would still mean behind Apple. Twice the 810's performance would mean Typhoon (A8) caught, but Twister/A9 still quite a bit ahead. Not the best news for higher end users (e.g., Samsung) trying to compete directly with Apple. At least sounds like overheating dealt with.
...but can it run Crysis?
- Dan