Qualcomm has been one of the dominant players in the smartphone and tablet chip space in recent years,  but the company’s latest high-end processor has taken a bit of heat… literally.

Soon Qualcomm will introduce its next-gen powerhouse, but some data about the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor has leaked a bit early, giving us an idea of what to expect from the successor to the Snapdragon 810.

820_001

The Snapdragon 810 chip used in phones such as the HTC One M9, Sony Xperia Z4, and ZTE Axon can be pretty fast at times. But it’s also known to overheat, which causes the chip to slow down substantially.

It’s too soon to say whether the Snapdragon 820, (also known as the MSM8996), will suffer from the same heat problems. But here’s what the leaked slides tell us about the processor so far.

It’ll be a 14nm FinFet chip with a Qualcomm Hydra CPU based on ARmv8 64-bit architecture and featuring Adreno 530 graphics.

The new chip could be up to 35 percent faster than the Snapdragon 810, while offering up to 40 percent better graphics. At the same time, it should consume less power, enabling support for longer battery life.

Other features include native support for H.265 and VP9 video decoding at resolutions up to 4K at 60 frames per second, a new audio codec, and a dedicated low-power sensor for always-on features.

The Snapdragon 820 processor is expected to be ready to ship by the fourth quarter of 2015.

A leaked roadmap shows that Qualcomm is also preparing to update its mid-range Snapdragon 400 and 600 series chips around the same time.

via G for Games

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7 replies on “Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 details leaked”

  1. The 620 looks pretty good with the a72 cores. It should be easy to improve on the 810’s performance as it used a57s as the highest performance cores.

  2. You would think that just going down to 14 nm would reduce the heat output considerably, all other things being equal.

    1. Except the very concept of a die shrink implies things wouldn’t be equal. Intel’s Haswell microarchitecture saw a similar issue in that the increased transistor density and reduced surface area led to it running inconveniently hot at higher clocks in enthusiast desktop builds.

      1. i thought the overheating was due to moving the voltage regulators over to the cpu package.

    2. Mind, FAB advances aren’t just determined by size/scale ranges but also advances in the FAB processes.

      Like Intel has been using 3D Transistors since they started years ago with the 22nm FAB but ARM is only starting to use FinFETs now, similar trends for many other advances in FAB technology.

      While it also takes a generation or two before chip designers can properly optimize their designs for a given FAB as each new one introduces new engineering concerns/factors.

    3. Except nothing is equal ,everything goes forward.
      As for heat there is big distinction between mistakes that lead to high power consumption and heat vs intentionally clocking the CPU or GPU too high to con the consumer.
      SD810 had some problems on the memory side but the fact remains that the bulk of the problem was that they were just pushing clocks too high on purpose. If the A57 was clocked at 1.5GHz instead of 2GHz, the chip would have been fine(ish) thermally but the performance would have been poor. They missed their targeted clocks and decided to just clock it that high anyway. Samsung in the 7420 clocks the A57 cores at 2.1GHz (on 14ff) and that’s too high too. You can’t put max load on all 4 cores without the chip overheating right away and slowing down to protect itself.You can load a couple of cores for a few minutes. SD810 is much worse being on 20nm. Pretty much the same problem on the GPU side but there they can sustain advertised speeds for a bit longer.

      Anandtech had a look at A57 on 20nm and 14ff in 2 articles, one was a review for the Note 4 with Exynos and the other was about the Exynos 7420- in this one they also look at GPU power consumption. You can’t go to 4-5W or even well above that in phones,yet this year some folks do.
      What we see next hard to say ,likely not 4 cores that can be fully loaded and sustain those speeds but just 2 and the other 2 are mostly marketing. They might go for 2 cores clocked high and the other 2 significantly lower for total power that fits a phone’s thermal budget and that would work since it’s less fraudulent and consumers get what it’s being advertised.But that’s a matter of being able to hit projected targets and strategy.

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