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Qualcomm Announces Latest Snapdragon 845 Processor (9to5google.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the have-a-good-ring-to-it dept.

The processor to power the next generation of Android flagship smartphones has been announced today. Qualcomm unveiled the new Snapdragon 845 processor at the 2017 Snapdragon Tech Summit, where Microsoft announced it was working with its PC partners to bring Windows 10 to Qualcomm's ARM processors. While more technical details of the chip will be announced tomorrow, we do know that the Snapdragon 845 processor is based on a 10nm processor and will feature the latest X20 LTE modem for gigabit connectivity speeds. Generally speaking, the new processor will bring improved performance, better power efficiency, and improved image processing.

25 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Wow! by c6gunner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Newsflash: Qualcom is making a new processor which will be faster and stuff. No more details at this time.

    Gee, thanks. I would have never guessed.

    1. Re:Wow! by ad454 · · Score: 2

      Actually this is quite news worthy.

      Many folks were concerned that Qualcomm was focusing too much of their corporate resources on legal, instead of R&D.

      It is always better to entice your customers with innovative and superior products, rather that piss them off with lawsuits.

    2. Re:Wow! by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2

      Well at least we know that Qualcomm is not going to throw in the towel, leave the IT business, marry a nice Swiss girl and go and farm goats in a bucolic mountain village.

      If I were Qualcomm that's what I'd do. Apple and Samsung have been right cunts recently.

      It's good to know they're sticking in there.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    3. Re:Wow! by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Interesting

      marry a nice Swiss girl and go and farm goats in a bucolic mountain village

      Is there a website for that? :-)

  2. good but.. by etash · · Score: 1

    will there ever be a smartphone which will have BOTH a top end cpu AND >= 5000mah battery?

    1. Re:good but.. by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      Just make it with a smaller screen and you won't need such a large battery.

  3. Exciting! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unless Qualcomm has had a real change of heart lately the most 'exciting' feature of the new chip will be the fact that, since they've abandoned suppport for their binary blobs on the old chip; it will reasonably soon be the only Qualcomm option that runs contemporary Android.

  4. Perhaps... by YuppieScum · · Score: 1

    ...but it won't fit into a pocket.

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    1. Re:Perhaps... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      Samsung had an interesting idea for the Galaxy S2. You had a phone which was slim with the default battery and back. Or you could could have a slightly less slim device with a larger battery

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Unfortunately I never managed to get hold of one.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:Perhaps... by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      They also had an interesting idea for the Galaxy Note 7, but many of their customers ended up getting burned by it.

    3. Re:Perhaps... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      The Note 7 was the biggest disaster they've had. And why did it happen?

      I'd say it's because they knew if they were trying to cram as large a battery in as they could and reduce the charging times as much as possible.

      Why did they have to do that? Because they chose a non removable battery and they also knew that concerns about battery life rate pretty highly

      http://bgr.com/2014/05/21/best...

      It's getting much harder for smartphone companies to really differentiate their products, especially if they don't already have a loyal user base like the ones Apple and Samsung enjoy. In various marketing campaigns, HTC has tried pushing the high quality of its smartphones' hardware, Nokia has tried selling us on its killer camera and LG has tried hyping up buttons that live on the back, and not the front, of the smartphone. However, there's one spec that matters to users more than any other than many smartphone vendors have seemingly overlooked in their ad campaigns: Battery life.

      The Guardian directs our attention to a new survey from U.K.-based research firm GMI that asked British smartphone users what features were important to them when it comes to deciding on a new smartphone. Fully 89% of them said that battery life was important to them, more than 20 percentage points higher than the number of people who said buying from a trusted brand was important to them. This suggests that there's a significant chunk of smartphone buyers out there who might conceivably jump at a phone from a relatively unknown vendor if it could give them top-notch battery life.

      This new research gels with research released by IDC earlier this month that similarly showed that battery life has become the single most important factor for people who are buying smartphones. In that survey, 56% of Android buyers, 49% of iPhone buyers and 53% of Windows Phone buyers said that battery life was a key reason they bought their particular device, whereas just which 33% of Android users, 39% of iPhone users and 38% of Windows Phone users said ease of use was a key reason.

      So here's a free piece of advice to any smartphone vendor that's struggling to gain traction in a market that's dominated by Apple and Samsung: Develop a phone of reasonable thinness that also boasts insanely great battery life and market its battery power to death.

      If you can swap the battery with a fresh one off the charger, then charge time is less important. If the battery is non removable then it is important.

      Samsung obviously pushed things too far and ended up with a phone that blew up.

      Now if they'd have stuck to removable batteries they could have avoided that. Hell, just sell the phone, a spare battery and a charger as a bundle, as they apparently did with S2s for a while in Korea. They used to run ads mocking Apple devices for not having a removable battery too.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Unfortunately it seems like they're going to keep pushing thinness, sleek aluminium and glass design, higher resolution displays and non removable batteries as features, even though there's no real evidence that people who actually buy their phones care about that stuff.

      I.e. they've made a terrible mistake - their marketing pushed features that they knew people cared about. And then in later models they dropped those features and tried to convince everyone other stuff mattered more.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    4. Re:Perhaps... by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately it seems like they're going to keep pushing thinness, sleek aluminium and glass design

      That's an unfortunate side-effect of having the design driven by hipsters rather than engineers. I really, really, really don't care if some phone is 0.1mm thinner than someone else's (or 1mm, or 2mm, who'll even notice?), I just want good battery life.

      Unfortunately the hipsters have dictated that it has to be thin, and who cares if half the phone users on the planet have to carry external battery packs with them wherever they go, look at how hip and thin it is!

    5. Re:Perhaps... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      I blame tech bloggers myself. I like the S5 because it had a removable battery. Tech bloggers complained the back looked like a band aid and the design 'felt cheap'.

      Then they released the S6 which had no removable battery and no SD card. Basically they were copying Apple. And the tech bloggers gave it points for improvement

      https://www.theverge.com/2015/...

      It's not okay to make a cheap-looking phone anymore.

      I'm surprised he didn't say "it's, like, totally problematic to make a cheap looking phone"

      Now that Apple is finally making big phones, and even the cheapest Android phones feel nice, we all expect more from Samsung - and rightly so. A flagship phone has to be great or it's going to get laughed out of the room. If the Galaxy S6 was another plasticky, boring phone like last year's Galaxy S5 or if it merely introduced a few hardware tricks, it would have gotten laughed out of the entire neighborhood.

      There is a version of the phone with a hardware trick, the Galaxy S6 Edge with a curved display. But that's a distraction; the real story is that Samsung needed to learn that hardware prowess and software features are tools you use to build something great, not ends in themselves. Most Galaxy phones are uninspired compilations of spec lists. For the S6, Samsung to needed to find inspiration, and it did: in Apple.

      The Galaxy S6 is what happens when Samsung doesn't try to copy Apple's phones, but instead finally tries to copy Apple's product philosophy.

      The first thing to know about the S6 is that it doesn't feel much like other Samsung phones. Instead of a plastic or faux-leather back, it's glass on the front and the back with metal around the rim. We've seen other phones do this, but none have done it so well. The Galaxy S6 looks great and feels even better.

      The edges are subtly textured from flat to curved in all the right spots. The seams between the glass and the metal are nigh-microscopic, and the whole thing just feels fantastic. It weighs just a hair more than an iPhone 6, and it's slightly bigger as well. But I actually find it easier to hold and to reach the far corners because the glass is less likely to slip than the iPhone's metal finish. It glides into a pocket and stays in my hand.

      If you wanted to go hunting for problems, you could find them. Maybe the Gorilla Glass 4 won't hold up to drops or could be prone to scratching (neither has been the case for me so far). The camera bump on the back is an overly large wart. That's about it, from a straight physical design perspective. And in both cases, I'm simply not worried about it.

      Then there's the elephant in the room: it really does remind you of the iPhone. This isn't a straight rip, of course. From the front, it's the spitting image of the Galaxy S5. The back is glass, and the curves fit Samsung's traditional Galaxy shape instead of iPhone's rounded rectangle. But take a look at the bottom of each phone: You'll find the same perfectly machined holes and ports in basically identical spots. Samsung also dropped the removable battery, the microSD storage expansion, and even the waterproofing, all in the name of design.

      THE GALAXY S6 LOOKS GREAT AND FEELS EVEN BETTER

      This comparison is the makings of an epic argument between partisans of both companies (and I'm sure you will get a taste of that if you read the comments below). But I really don't care if Samsung copied any particular iPhone design element or not. What I care about is that it really does seem like Samsung finally got around to copying the most important thing: a fully conceived, well-executed design.

      It's actually remarkable to see a Samsung device where design feels like it was a consideration from the start, not something applied only after the component list was compiled. Go ahead and have your battles about which is better, who copied who, and even whether it's worth los

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  5. backdoor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    what kind of backdoor do THEY have?

  6. Improved: Now only 35% slower than Apple's A10! by JoeyRox · · Score: 1, Informative

    For single-core performance, and even that is optimistic. The 835 is 43% slower than the A10 in single-core performance.

    1. Re:Improved: Now only 35% slower than Apple's A10! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Ya maybe but; Fuck apple!

    2. Re:Improved: Now only 35% slower than Apple's A10! by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      I don't believe Apple lies like their g3 cube was a supercomputer.

      iPhones are crippled for peasants and are not real computers. I do not want a glued in DRM black box and prefer to use my own phone. I am sure this chip is quite faster or similar

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    3. Re:Improved: Now only 35% slower than Apple's A10! by sirket · · Score: 1

      So the various independent sites that have tested the chips and confirmed the performance are in on the conspiracy?

      https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Apple-A11-Performance-Review-iPhone-8-Plus-Taking-Desktop

      https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-phone,review-4676.html

    4. Re:Improved: Now only 35% slower than Apple's A10! by sirket · · Score: 1

      https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-phone,review-4676.html

      Took .7 seconds to open a PDF on the iPhone 8 versus 6.5 seconds on the Galaxy Note 8.

      iPhone 8 had twice the graphics performance of the Galaxy Note 8. Like to play games on your phone- CPU and GPU matter.

    5. Re:Improved: Now only 35% slower than Apple's A10! by JohnStock · · Score: 1

      Yeah but Apple devices have owners that are 200% more pretentious than Android users on single and multi-core applications.

  7. Windows on Arm? Again? by 4wdloop · · Score: 1

    WinRT anyone? Or is WinCE? (no, that's dead, and was never truly Windows) Or WP (windows phone)? Or Win IoT (on Rpi3)?

    Are the CPUs finally getting there to run the full windows desktop?
    Not that will be very useful without all the Windows app ecosystem to most peoples...

    --
    4wdloop
    1. Re:Windows on Arm? Again? by Myria · · Score: 1

      WinRT anyone? Or is WinCE? (no, that's dead, and was never truly Windows) Or WP (windows phone)? Or Win IoT (on Rpi3)?

      Are the CPUs finally getting there to run the full windows desktop?
      Not that will be very useful without all the Windows app ecosystem to most peoples...

      This time, Windows comes with an emulator that can run x86-32 programs, even desktop applications. No 64-bit for now, but for developers requiring that, they can recompile their products for ARM64. No requirement to switch to WinStore.

      --
      "Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
    2. Re:Windows on Arm? Again? by GreatDrok · · Score: 1

      "Are the CPUs finally getting there to run the full windows desktop?"

      ARM has always been capable of running a full desktop. I remember when the Acorn Archimedes came out back in the 1980's and it was the fastest machine out there running rings around anything Intel, Motorola or MOS had. There was even a software PC emulator that could run DOS and Windows at full speed.

      Over the years ARM found itself in a variety of platforms but not so much the desktop and the design focussed on efficiency and low energy but there was always the potential to make a storming fast desktop machine again. Of course, it is going to be hobbled again trying to run Windows but stick Linux on ARM and it moves along pretty well.

      ARM64 with gobs of RAM, a fast GPU and SSD would likely be a very respectable desktop today. The Apple A10 is very similar in performance to an Intel i5 so it is no slouch.

      --
      "I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
  8. worthy post by adforest · · Score: 1

    a worthy post. thank you for this information. hope for the better power efficiency, and improved image processing.

  9. Different from WIndows RT how? by aratuk · · Score: 1

    Has Microsoft explained how "Window 10 on ARM" is going to be different from the quickly-abandoned Windows RT debacle?