Qualcomm: Snapdragon 820 will deliver huge efficiency, performance boosts

Qualcomm has spent the past few weeks dishing information on its next-generation Snapdragon 820 hardware in bits and pieces. We’ve previously covered the announcement of the next-generation GPU and DSP inside the SoC, but details on the upcoming Kryo CPU have been frustratingly hard to come by. Now, the company is finally starting to share that information. The Qualcomm Kryo is a new, high-performance ARM CPU with just four cores. Qualcomm may have used big.Little 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’s 14nm FinFET process, and offers full 64-bit support. Qualcomm is claiming that the CPU will deliver “up to 2x the performance and up 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 under load than its predecessors, but it does point to some significant improvements. The 2.2GHz frequency range implies that Qualcomm is holding maximum clocks roughly steady compared with its last quad-core 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.

One interesting twist on Qualcomm’s Kryo approach is that the company isn’t catering to the Eastern markets that have often explicitly pushed for higher core counts and big.Little 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 past, smaller core counts with better efficiency have proven to throttle less under sustained load, and Samsung’s 14nm technology should help with this as well.

Qualcomm’s 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 various processing blocks to ensure optimal execution. This new technology (presumably Symphony runs in software, though it might have 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 great deal riding on the success of the Snapdragon 820, which is why it’s so important for early devices to hit the ground running. 2015 was an off year for the company, which found itself outpaced on the technical front by Samsung’s Exynos 7420 while still facing increased encroachment from low-end competitors. A svelte quad-core with high efficiency and good overall performance could put the company back in the drivers’ seat — assuming that its recent decision to embrace short-term quarterly results and the cult of shareholder value don’t torpedo its business in the longer term.