The Snapdragon 855 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2019
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 15, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- SoCs
- 7nm
- Snapdragon 855
Final Thoughts
2018 has been a very successful year for Qualcomm and the Snapdragon 845. The company had provided an extremely solid and well-rounded SoC for device vendors to build their flagship devices on- and by the looks of it the Snapdragon 855 continues this trend.
I’ve been a bit sceptical about the merits of Qualcomm’s 1+3 CPU configuration, however after seeing the preliminary performance and power efficiency figures of the new prime core on the new chipset, I’m not nearly as concerned. We reserve any final verdict for when we will have tested final commercial devices, as that’s where in the end we’ll also see the efficiency effect of the non-prime cores, and how they’ll position themselves against the competition.
Performance wise, the Snapdragon 855 is a bit odd. In steady-state workloads like SPEC the chipset is seemingly performing very well and matches or exceeds the new Kirin 980. Here Qualcomm’s changes to the CPU microarchitecture might even actually be visible in the test results, which is a nice feat. Unfortunately the memory subsystem still seems to include some of DRAM latency regressions that we also saw in the Snapdragon 845, both which are due to Qualcomm’s system level cache.
Real-world performance, while still excellent, doesn’t quite manage to reach my expectations I had for the chipset. Here for whatever reason, the chip’s improvements are not nearly as pronounced as in the more synthetic tests. Again the odd thing is that the Kirin 980 still manages to beat the Snapdragon 855 in near most of these workloads. Qualcomm had reasoned that the microarchitectural changes to the CPU were meant to help web browser performance, yet it’s here where the chip slightly lags behind the competition – I do wonder if this is a case of the CPU again being limited by either Qualcomm’s choice of more conservative caches or due to the latency penalty of the system cache.
Although the performance shown today is exemplary, it still does look maybe a little rough around the edges in some of our system performance tests – here maybe Qualcomm will be able to investigate and further improve things until we actually see commercial devices.
Whether the system performance will be improved in final devices or not, what is clear though is that power efficiency looks outstanding. Qualcomm had me worried as the PR teams had avoided talking about efficiency during the chipset’s launch, but the results today (even if they’ll need to be verified), look very promising and should result in notable battery life improvements in 2019’s devices.
On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm’s more muted performance projections of 20% were because the company has again focused a good part of the process improvements into bringing the overall power back down from the usually higher levels that we saw on the Snapdragon 845.
Overall – the Snapdragon 855 looks to be another extremely well executed SoC from Qualcomm, and I’m looking forward to validating the results and testing out the first commercial devices once they become available.
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tipoo - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Untrue. Apples cores are wider, deeper, more OoO than anything else in mobile, and use massive caches at that. You have it reversed, if Android could use the A12 it would post impressive benchmarks, it's hardware design.Low level benchmarks are meant to remove the OS from the equation. Proof is in the pudding.
goatfajitas - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
The A12 is a great CPU, but it's not magic. It's all ARM. The difference is in the implementation and control that Apple has with integration. Whatever though, both ways have benefits and downsides. I am just saying that people that think it's all about this CPU that is somehow years ahead of everyone else are mistaken as to the reality of the situation. Suffice to say, it's all fast.axius81 - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
This just doesn't make sense. "It's all ARM." Yeah, sure, and one companies implementation of that instruction set can absolutely be superior.That's like saying "It's all x86 / x86-64." when we're comparing AMD and Intel. One can *absolutely* be faster than the other at implementing that instruction set - and in practice, is.
Apple makes amazing ARM chips, irrespective of iOS.
goatfajitas - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
They are great chips, I am just saying they are not (hardware wise) way beyond what the competition is doing. Alot of that performance is OS, tight integration with apps, drivers, API's etc as its all controlled by one company. That isnt a bad thing, that is a good thing for Apple customers.techconc - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Actually, Apple is significantly ahead of what the competition is doing with ARM based chips. This can be objectively measured.tipoo - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
What do you call their massive cache and issue width advantage if not being hardware wise beyond the competition? It's not magic, but Apple is clearly spending more on die area than Qualcomm is.bji - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Yeah I don't think you know what you're talking about. I think you read somewhere that some of Apple's performance/stability superiority over Android come from Apple controlling the whole stack and you've generalized that into places where the statement just isn't true.techconc - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
You seem to conflate the ARM instruction set with the actual design of the chip. You then play off Apple's obvious advantages as some sort of magic... err.. "integration" as you call it. That's nonsense. You might be able to claim that for a specific application, but not for generic benchmarks.tipoo - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
I didn't say it was magic. I said it's not entirely down to some ambiguous "optimization" with the OS. The cores themselves are physically impressive regardless of OS."It's all ARM."
This shows me you may have missed crucial step, Apple is only licencing the ARM instruction set, but otherwise they design the whole very wide, deep, very OoO core themselves.
tipoo - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
I didn't say it was magic. I said it's not entirely down to some ambiguous "optimization" with the OS. The cores themselves are physically impressive regardless of OS. It's when people play it off as some pie in the sky optimization advantage that they're claiming magic, you can't make a 3-wide Braswell core fly just with vertical integration."It's all ARM."
This shows me you may have missed crucial step, Apple is only licencing the ARM instruction set, but otherwise they design the whole very wide, deep, very OoO core themselves.