Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 820 processor will be the first chip based on the company’s new Kryo architecture, and the chip maker says the new technology is both faster and more efficient than the company’s most powerful chips to date.

In fact, Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 820 will be offer up to twice the performance of a Snapdragon 810 processor, while offering twice the power efficiency.

snapdragon 820

While the Snapdragon 810 processor featured four ARM Cortex-A57 cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, the Snapdragon 820 uses Qualcomm”s new custom CPU cores, called Kryo.

This isn’t a new thing for Qualcomm. Up until recently, the company had a habit of utilizing its own custom cores for Snapdragon chips. But Kryo wasn’t ready to go by the time Qualcomm wanted to make the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit processors, which is why the Snapdragon 808 and 810 chips used ARM designs.

kryo

Kryo is a 14nm, 64-bit CPu with support for speeds up to 2.2 GHz. It’s designed to work with Qualcomm’s Adreno 530 graphics and Hexagon 680 digital signal processor.

 

Qualcomm says it uses heterogenous computing, to leverage different core functions including CPU, GPU, and DSP depending on what it is your phone needs to do, enabling better performance and lower power consumption. The new Qualcomm Symphony System Manager is in charge of figuring out which processors should be assigned which tasks.

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13 replies on “Qualcomm says Snapdragon 820 is twice as fast as 810”

  1. 820 really needs to be made on Samsung’s 14nm process. Just like exynos 7420 and A9. Any other process will overheat.

    1. it even uses 14nm lpp instead of exynos lpe. that means 10% more performance.

    1. I’m not even convinced there is a heat issue with the 810, as opposed to the press running with a story, but ignoring that, about the only thing that is seemingly the same about the chip is the company making it. So I wouldn’t be too concerned.

  2. The 2x perf claim is as empty as it can get. It’s not about the core, it factors in the GPU and DSP but the DSP has a very specific role and GPGPU has very very limited usage for now , even more so when you got the DSP for image manipulation.

    The fact that they don’t provide a relevant perf increase number is actually a huge red flag. There have been rumors that it’s only 35% faster than SD810 and that would be too little vs A72, if A72 hits it’s clock targets. Power consumption and die size do matter and could provide some advantages even if perf ends up lacking a bit.

    When a corporation has a good product,they aren’t afraid to be honest about it and providing misleading numbers is not needed. We’ll see how it turns out but expectations might need to be dialed down a bit. It would be a huge problem for them if they messed up Kryo, since it would be a multi-year problem so hopefully they didn’t.

    1. The increase is probably from going from 20nm to 14nm. Should solve the heating issues. SD810 couldn’t sustain max frequency and ran into performance problems.

    2. Well, it’s not uncommon for companies to play up their strengths even if it’s technically not exagerrating. Especially after all the bad press they got with the 810. Also, pure per clock performance isn’t that critical. IIRC, Krait performed lower than A15 but could be clocked higher and was still more battery efficient so it ended up being more popular. Now, how they compare to the different chipsets using ARM’s own designs remains to be seen.

      1. I never mentioned clocks so don’t go there for no reason. The A72 target clocks are in relation to the perf of the shipping product. The target is 2.5GHz for quad cores. If A72 gets close to that then we know how those SoCs would do. They don’t mention CPU perf, that’s the problem. They come up with a very high number but you don’t need that if real numbers look good.Corporations do go too far but the more misleading the claim the more likely something if off. And Qualcomm’s behavior ahead of SD810 was similar, they overreacted and showed their hand, it was clear the rumors are true. If they had a 60% CPU gain over a cold SD810,it would be great and they would just say that.

  3. Might as well wait another year if they advance so quickly.
    I don’t see why it’s worth upgrading from 800,801 to 808 or 810. Now this 820 seems worth it

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