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SnapdragonUpdated

Qualcomm has spent the past few weeks dishing data on its next-generation Snapdragon 820 hardware in bits and pieces. We've previously covered the proclamation of the next-generation GPU and DSP inside the SoC, but details on the upcoming Kryo CPU have been frustratingly hard to come up by. Now, the visitor is finally starting to share that information. The Qualcomm Kryo is a new, loftier-functioning ARM CPU with but iv cores. Qualcomm may have used large.Trivial for its Snapdragon 810 and other recent designs, but the company has apparently decided to move back towards a traditional four-core configuration.

The upcoming Kryo core will clock in at 2.2GHz, is built on Samsung'due south 14nm FinFET process, and offers total 64-bit support. Qualcomm is challenge that the CPU will evangelize "upwards to 2x the operation and upwardly to 2x the power efficiency when compared to the Snapdragon 810 processor." That's not an incredibly high bar, given that the Snapdragon 810 has earned a reputation for running toasty and throttling more nether load than its predecessors, but it does point to some meaning improvements. The 2.2GHz frequency range implies that Qualcomm is belongings maximum clocks roughly steady compared with its concluding quad-cadre architecture, the Snapdragon 800 and its Krait CPU. Snapdragon 801 and 805 devices added higher turbo frequencies, but the original Snapdragon 800 topped out around 2.2GHz.

Snapdragon CPU performandce

One interesting twist on Qualcomm'due south Kryo approach is that the company isn't catering to the Eastern markets that take often explicitly pushed for higher core counts and big.Piddling devices. We've detailed some of the resulting SoCs, including MediaTek's own upcoming 10-core CPU, with three isolated power islands. With Snapdragon 808 and 810, Qualcomm seemed to be moving in a similar direction, but the Snapdragon 820 is hauling back on the reigns again. In the by, smaller core counts with improve efficiency accept proven to throttle less nether sustained load, and Samsung's 14nm technology should help with this as well.

Qualcomm'southward various heterogeneous compute components (GPU, DSP, and CPU) will be collectively managed by the Qualcomm Symphony System Manager. The company claims that Symphony is capable of intuiting where workloads should run for best performance and then managing communication between the diverse processing blocks to ensure optimal execution. This new applied science (presumably Symphony runs in software, though information technology might take some hardware functionality baked in at the device level) controls a number of components, including the CPU, DSP, Spectra ISP, the display engine, GPU, GPS unit, and memory subsystem.

Qualcomm has a nifty deal riding on the success of the Snapdragon 820, which is why information technology's so important for early devices to hit the ground running. 2022 was an off twelvemonth for the company, which found itself outpaced on the technical front past Samsung'due south Exynos 7420 while still facing increased encroachment from low-end competitors. A svelte quad-cadre with high efficiency and good overall functioning could put the visitor back in the drivers' seat — bold that its recent determination to embrace brusque-term quarterly results and the cult of shareholder value don't torpedo its business organization in the longer term.