Qualcomm’s introducing its Snapdragon 820 processor using the latest most annoying trend in tech: dribble out one small detail at a time over the span of weeks. ‘ve already heard about the G/IS/a> the DS/a>, now Qualcomm is talking about the Kyro C. Unfortunately, the blog post in which it details the C is thin on details.
The Snapdragon 820 is said to be optimized for “heterogeneous computing,” one of the latest buzzwords in Cs. It’s a fancy way of saying “the C is made to divide up tasks between it specialized hardware like the G, DS or image processor instead of doing everything by itself.” thout any details about exactly what is going on inside the processor, it’s a fairly meaningless buzzword.
Qualcomm says it’s “Symphony System Manager” makes all the various parts of the Snapdragon 820 work together for higher performance lower power use. But mobile processors have had sophisticated hardware to manage the power performance of C cores the G DS such for quite some time now. The company didn’t go into detail about exactly how the Symphony System Manger works, what makes it different than the similar hardware on its previous chips.
Digging through the blog post cutting out the hype-y buzzwords, here’s what we can dig out:
1. The Snapdragon 820 is made using the latest 14nm manufacturing process.
2. It has 4 custom C cores named Kyro (previous Qualcomm chips like the 801 805 used custom cores, but the 810 used ARM-designed cores). They can run up to 2.2 GHz.
3. Qualcomm claims the chip (not the C cores, the chip as a whole!) can offer “up to” double the performance of the Snapdragon 810 double the power efficiency. More on that in a bit.
4. There’s a sophisticated system manager called Symphony that carefully manages the power state performance state of all the major parts of the system-on-chip (C cores, G, DS image processor, display engine, memory system, so on).
y particular note of the “2x the performance power efficiency” claim. Qualcomm is not stating that the Kyro C is twice as fast, just that the new Snapdragon 820 chip as a whole is up to twice as fast as the 810. That’s an important point, because it’s wholly dependent on what’s being measured. Is that 3D games performance? Is that the image processor? Some combination of pieces working in an optimum configuration?
Similarly, double the “power efficiency” doesn’t mean twice the battery life. wer efficiency means “how much work gets done in a given amount of power.” If it’s twice as fast uses the same amount of power, that’s double the power efficiency. It’s sort of a meaningless statistic without looking at the workload involved. so note, much of the power drain of a modern mobile device is from the display radio, so you can cut the processor power use in half you won’t double your battery life.
The story behind the story: Qualcomm endured some bad press lost customers over the Snapdragon 810, which was criticized for running hot not providing enough of a performance improvement over it’s previous Snapdragon 805. The company is trying to make sure everyone knows that its next big high-end chip, due to appear in phones in early 2016, will be super fast while sipping battery running cool. And maybe it will! But the trickle of buzzword-laden information it is doling out sound like the promises of every processor maker, ever: it’s faster, it’s more energy efficient, it enables things you never dreamed of. ‘ll try not to get excited until we see some actual independent hardware tests.
