Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 21, 2014 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- SoCs
- Snapdragon 805
Final Words
Qualcomm tends to stagger the introduction of new CPU and GPU IP. Snapdragon 805 ultimately serves as Qualcomm's introduction vehicle for its Adreno 420 GPU. The performance gains there over Adreno 330/Snapdragon 801 can be substantial, particularly at high resolutions and/or higher quality settings. Excluding 3DMark, we saw a 20 - 50% increase in GPU performance compared to Snapdragon 801. Adreno 420 is a must have if you want to drive a higher resolution display at the same performance as an Adreno 330/1080p display combination. With OEMs contemplating moving to higher-than-1080p resolution screens in the near term, leveraging Snapdragon 805 may make sense there.
The gains on the CPU side are far more subtle. At best we noted a 6% increase in performance compared to a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801, but depending on thermal/chassis limitations of shipping devices you may see even less of a difference.
Qualcomm tells us that some of its customers will choose to stay on Snapdragon 801 until the 810 arrives next year, while some will choose to release products based on 805 in the interim. Based on our results here, if an OEM is looking to specifically target the gaming market I can see Snapdragon 805 making a lot of sense. For most of those OEMs that just launched Snapdragon 801 based designs however, I don't know that there's a huge reason to release a refresh in the interim.
I am curious to evaluate the impact of ISP changes as well as dive deeper into 4K capture and H.265 decode, but that will have to wait until we see shipping designs. The other big question is just how power efficient Adreno 420 is compared to Adreno 330. Qualcomm's internal numbers are promising, citing a 20% reduction in power consumption at effectively the same performance in GFXBench's T-Rex HD onscreen test.
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kron123456789 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Well, i don't belive it because of benchmarking results. Nvidia promised 60fps in T-Rex HD, and here it is. And Nvidia also promised 2.5x performance on Manhattan Offscreen test compared Apple's A7. And here it is(30fps vs 13.3fps). Well, almost 2.5x.AnandTechUser99 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
NVIDIA had shown us the benchmarks in January.When the iPad Mini Retina (and other A7 devices) had been benchmarked towards the end of January in Manhattan Offscreen 1080p, they had average scores closer to 667 (10.8 Fps). Based off of this score, the Tegra K1 was offering a score ~2.65x that of the A7.
Sometime around March 10th, the average score for Apple's A7 had changed to 803 (13.0 Fps). I assume there was some sort of software update that boosted their Manhattan score.
Ghost420 - Friday, May 23, 2014 - link
i'm glad that if it is down clocked to 600mhz in the MiPad, benchmarks shows it's still kicking QC buttGhost420 - Friday, May 23, 2014 - link
on a side note, this is very good for SOC competition...hopefullyArthurG - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
So read this:http://en.miui.com/thread-22041-1-1.html
5hours heavy 3D game on 6700mAH battery means that TK1 runs with ~3W
and 11 hours on video
so excellent numbers when taking into account the leading performance
testbug00 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
about 5 hours. Hm, I wish they had ran the tests longer... Ideally (for testing purposes, not time purposes) they would have ran everything for 20-25%(+) of the tablets battery life, and used that.OR
Did the tests from 75% or 50% battery.
Using 15 minutes (read: 5%) is a bit low amount of battery wear... It should be pretty accurate, but, I would skew that test a little lower (my experience is phones (over 5 phones) and tablets (over 2 tablets) tend to lose the first few percent of battery the slowest, and, it gives an inflated battery life.
According to the first 5% of battery (from 100% to 95%) on an iPad mini, well, It gave me something like 8 hours of usage playing hearthstone...
Same with video watching on Nook HD+
Same with Video (and reading webpages) watching on 920/1020
Same on reading webpages/playing weak applications on my Moto G
Same with web pages on some cheapass Android LG
Same with video/web pages on my old iPhone 4.
I would guess the real battery is closer to 4-4.5 hours (happy to be proven wrong ^__^) and the SoC is not running max clock (for good reason, no need to run max clock when you already hit a game fps gap, or, the refresh rate of the tablet)
Ghost0420 - Wednesday, May 28, 2014 - link
Doesn't Asus have a TF701T? which uses a Tegra 4 @ 1.9Mhz, WITHOUT A FAN? One bad review, because Toshiba don't know how to make a tablet, and everyone thinks T4 runs hot. The fan in the Shield is very quite and doesn't 'spool' up as if T4 was overheating, it runs very smoothly and the the interface is very smooth. Also, streaming AWAY from your house on good WiFi for PC games is working quite well now.And at least NV is updating its software....consistently...unlike most OEMs.
TheJian - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
Agreed. Also Denver is in house where 810 isn't. I would expect CPU stuff to show Denver is better on power when taxed as Qcom in house won't be around until late 2015 or Q1 2016 since 810 is 1h2015. The GPU will heavily favor NV (even AMD at some point if they get in with a good SOC) as nobody else but AMD has 20yrs of gaming experience. We already have seen K1 is pretty good against the 805. Odd they ran from battery here..."Here even NVIDIA's Shield with Tegra 4 cooled by a fan can't outperform the Adreno 420 GPU"
Anandtech needs to stop makings dumb NV statements. It's a YEAR old device and won't even be in this race, not to mention it's not getting a ton from the fan anyway which is really there for longevity and temps in the hands for hours (we game hard and for hours so keeps it cool). The fan isn't in there to hit 2.5ghz or something, it's 1.9. This device will be facing K1. Stop taking AMD checks to be their portal site, and you can get back to making unbiased reporting without the little BS NV digs.
ArthurG - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
So true for the last paragraph !Let's see if Anand will say "TK1 Kepler GPU smokes Adreno 420, providing twice the performance on GFX3.0 bench with half memory bandwidth"
I'm waiting for it, right Anand ?
ams23 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Technically the difference in memory bandwidth is closer to 50% due to differences in mem. operating speeds for these two SoC's.