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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goatfajitas - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
What makes the Ax series so fast is the tight OS integration. It's a good chip, but not years ahead hardware-wise. What makes the whole thing so fast is the OS and how it's implemented. Either way good for Apple, but it's more SW than HWbji - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
You tried to make this point before and failed. Give it up maybe?goatfajitas - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
You may have failed to grasp it, but that is on you.Graag - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
No, it's just blatantly wrong.tuxRoller - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
Proof?sean8102 - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
I don't buy that either. It's pretty well known Apple has some damn good chip designers in house. I'm no expert but one of the biggest things that stand out to me when comparing Apples designs is how much cache they use. The A12 has 128KB instruction and 128 KB data L1 cache and 8MB of L2 cache. It seems the 855 has basically ~2MB L2 cache (divided among each "cluster") and 2 MB of L3 cache. I haven't seen a Android avalible SOC that comes close the amount of cache that Apple puts on its SOC's which from what I understand is quite expensive to do, and results in a larger die size. But give large performance benefits. Of course that's only one example of something they do differently, considering that with a 2 high power plus 4 low power cores setup they are still so far ahead they must be making significant changes compared to the reference design they get from ARM.Their hardware team deserves serious credit for staying so far ahead for so long.
HStewart - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
One big question I have always had with ARM based device especially in performance. - How does it compared with x86 platform except for power. This can be difficult to actually truly represent - especially with design difference in OS and applications.Application why a good example is running AutoCad - can even latest iPad Pro truly have performance of say latest quad or six core x86 based CPU and high end mobile GPU. I know Apple has iPad Pro version of Photoshop - but this is based on Photoshop CS and I personally like the earlier series - which I own CS 5.0
I think on ARM we long way from having a full version of Autocad, Solidworks, Lightwave 3d, 3dmax and others high end professional applications.
cpkennit83 - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
A12/A12X devices compare very favorably with U series Intel chips, and smack Y series chips. Lack of software is not due to lack of power, but perceived demand.goatfajitas - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
"A12/A12X devices compare very favorably with U series Intel chips" on selective tasks. It's a long way off from it in raw power.Wilco1 - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Benchmarks clearly show performance is about the same. In fact it looks like A12X is well ahead in terms of raw power, for example by 30% on compilation (LLVM test).