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Qualcomm Snapdragon 820

Today, Qualcomm formally launched the Snapdragon 820, ending the tedious drip of announcements of piecemeal revelations that we've received over the last few months. This SoC is arriving at a critical time for Qualcomm. From 2022 to 2022, the company rose to command a significant chunk of the smartphone SoC market. By Q3 2022, Qualcomm was measured as holding 42% of the market place for personal mobile devices, every bit measured by Jon Peddie Research.

2015, even so, brought fresh headwinds. The Snapdragon 810 was widely believed to accept 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 own thermals well as a event. Later point iterations on the chip may also have improved the state of affairs. Either manner, Qualcomm took a serious revenue hit when Samsung opted to use its own silicon in the Galaxy S6 family, even overall Milky way sales failed to see expectations.

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Details! Or not. Click to overstate.

All of which is to say, Qualcomm needs this chip to be a hit. The "Kryo" CPU core is a custom scrap built on Samsung's second-generation 14nm applied science (14 LPP). Qualcomm is advertising the CPU as offering up to 2x functioning and 2x efficiency compared to previous generation parts, which is rather frustratingly vague. At a guess, this refers to the scrap'south theoretical maximum burst performance for a very short 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 power consumption improvements and functioning boosts tend to be highly workload dependent. Qualcomm is encouraging the utilize of its DSP and GPU as computation offloads to amend overall CPU efficiency.

Qualcomm does offer some boosted colour around overall power consumption, though they don't disclose their test environments or conditions.

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Ability consumption in "existent-life" workloads.

While we don't know the criteria that Qualcomm used to go far at these conclusions, the 65% of Snapdragon 801 power metric makes sense given what we know near estimated improvements for 14nm compared to TSMC's 28nm planar silicon. Information technology'south all the same sobering to note that this comeback arrives roughly 3 years since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon S4 family unit, which featured the then-new custom Krait CPU core. Even if we have Qualcomm at its discussion nearly the relative level of advocacy in CPU operation and power consumption, it'south taken iii years and ii node shrinks to deliver the kind of improvements we used to meet in 18 months and a single node shrink — and equally nosotros've already noted, we fully expect that Qualcomm's improvement claims will be situational, just as AMD'south and Intel's are. "Existent-life" workloads just vary also much to exist 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 lite. Qualcomm claims more than lx device wins for the new 820 SOC, including cameras, cars, and drones. Nvidia has been the SoC manufacturer making noise nigh the automotive business of late, so this could imply that QC wants to claiming NV on turf Squad Green is hoping to pale out for itself.

Without much physical detail on Kryo, we're forced to make some educated guesses about the core. Qualcomm has already revealed that the fleck is targeting a ii.2GHz clock frequency. The Exynos 7420, built on Samsung's 14nm LPE process, uses a 1.5GHz frequency base of operations and a two.1GHz heave clock. What's interesting to me is that Qualcomm has walked back the 810's commitment to a large.Footling approach and instead opted for a single unified processor block. This suggests that the Kryo CPU may emphasize instructions-per-cycle efficiency over clock speed.

Our guess is that Qualcomm has staked out a midpoint between Apple's A9 processor, which tends to pound the rest of the ARM family when it comes to single-thread operation, and scaling upward to eight or more than cores, the way Samsung and companies like MediaTek plan to do. A college-efficiency quad-core may represent the sugariness spot between these two extremes. Presumably, Qualcomm is using DVFS to control its clock frequencies and power gating, though there's always an outside chance that information technology adopted a technique like the AVFS AMD is using for Carrizo.

Putting it all together

Qualcomm'due south comprehensive spec sheet on the Snapdragon 820 is shown below. The company is claiming a bevy of improvements for its Adreno 530 GPU (upwards to 40% more functioning and xl% greater power efficiency than previous-generation hardware), new hardware decode and encode engines, an X12-form modem, and a diversity of enhancements to image processing and security.

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The full spec sheet. Click to overstate.

We've as well heard tell that while Qualcomm'southward SoC design for its upcoming server family is quite different from Snapdragon 820, the CPU may derive from Kryo. This makes sense, if truthful — building a common architecture and leveraging it across multiple contexts is how both AMD and Intel have historically done things, to skilful effect (Bulldozer nonetheless). If Qualcomm is serious nearly competing in the server marketplace, it will want to leverage economies of calibration.

If the Snapdragon 820 does well, we'll run into that reflected in phone design wins at CES and Mobile World Congress in early on 2022. The Snapdragon 810 may not take won the accolades that the Snapdragon 800 family received, merely the 808 and 810 combined have sold well and shipped in a number of high-contour designs. At the aforementioned time, however, Qualcomm faces increased competition from mainland Chinese and lower-cost Taiwanese companies. It needs the Snapdragon 820 to sell well if it wants to retain its de facto leadership of the Android market — a position Samsung arguably usurped with its own Exynos 7420 in 2022.

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