Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) Performance Preview: Qualcomm Mobile Development Tablet Tested
by Brian Klug on June 18, 2013 8:00 PM ESTFinal Words
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 is quite possibly its most ambitious SoC to date. The goal? To drive absolute performance while maintaining power efficiency. While Snapdragon 600 was clearly about delivering evolutionary gains in performance, Snapdragon 800 intends to compete with ARM's Cortex A15 and Intel's Bay Trail platform.
On the CPU performance front, Snapdragon 800's 2.3GHz Krait 400 cores do appear to hold their own quite well against ARM's Cortex A15. In some cases ARM holds the advantage, while in others the higher clocked Krait 400 takes the lead. We still have the question of power to answer, but Qualcomm bets it can deliver A15-like performance without A15-like power thanks to the 28nm HPM process at its foundry partners.
Qualcomm didn't have any power demos setup, so power analysis and battery life performance will have to come at a later date, but the claim is better performance at equivalent platform power as Snapdragon 600.
On the GPU side, we have a new king. Adreno 330 delivers huge performance improvements over Adreno 320 and everything else we've tested thus far. Snapdragon 800 is the new benchmark to beat. It's very clear to me why many tablet designs scheduled for later this year are based on Snapdragon 800 silicon.
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Parhelion69 - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Why is it Android CPU benchmark broken? Please enlighten me.I thought Antutu was a very good benchmark. And probably Geekbench as well.
darkice1111 - Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - link
Great performance. Now if only we could get some more software optimizations on Android... My iPhone 5 iOS 7 beta 3 results: Sunspider 1.0 - 709.0ms; Kraken - 13783.9ms; Octane v1 - 3056; Browsermark 2.0 - 3056. So 9 month old dual core hardware that's faster than anything on the market today, and faster in some benchmarks than something that's not even on the market yet... Google, wasssssssup??sna1970 - Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - link
Hi,How About comparing this to Nvidia Tegra 4 ?
MaxH - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Thanks Brian for a great test of this chipset. I am especially interested in the video encoding performance, and your inclusion of the 'MediaInfo' screen capture is really useful to see how it is encoding H.264 video.Your MediaInfo clip clearly shows that this chipset can encode H.264/AVC at 2160p @ 25fps @ 120Mbps, (Baseline @Level 5.1). As a low-budget film-maker, I am speculating about the possibility that the encoder could alternatively be configured to handle 1080p @ 30fps (perhaps 60fps) @ 4:2:2 colour sampling @ 10-bit (perhaps 12-bit) depth. I have not been able to get confirmation of this, but if so - at this price point, this chipset could potentially unlock high quality video capture on regular consumer-level DSLR-type cameras; something that has been limited to commercial broadcast cameras (at high-budget prices) up to now. If anyone is familiar enough with AVC profiles and Levels (and related matters) to be able to speculate about this, I would like to hear your thoughts. Thanks again to Brian.
Netwern - Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - link
Meanwhile Apple engineers...