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
CPU Performance
As always we'll start out our performance investigation with a handful of CPU bound web browser based tests. In all cases we used Chrome on the MDP/T. Remember there's only an 8% increase in peak CPU frequency here, so I wouldn't expect a huge difference vs. Snapdragon 801.
Here the MDP/T scales pretty well, showing a 6% improvement in performance over the Snapdragon 801 based Galaxy S 5. In the case of the GS5 we are looking at a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 implementation, so the improvement makes sense. Both the Cortex A15 (TF701T/Shield) and Apple's Cyclone (in the iPad Air) are higher performing designs here. Since there's no fundamental change to Krait's IPC, the only gains we see here are from the higher clock speed.
Kraken appears to be at its limit when it comes to Krait 400/450, there's effectively no additional frequency scaling beyond 2.3GHz. We're either running into an architectural limitation or limits of the software/browser combination itself.
Similarly we don't see any real progress in the Google Octane test either. Snapdragon 805's CPU cores may run at a higher peak frequency but that's definitely not the story here.
Basemark OS II
Basemark OS II gives us a look at native application performance across a variety of metrics. There are tests that hit the CPU, GPU as well as storage subsystems here. The gains here are exclusively on the graphics side, which makes sense given what we've just seen. Snapdragon 805's biggest gains will be GPU facing.
Geekbench 3.0
Although I don't typically use Geekbench, I wanted to include some numbers here to highlight that the increase in memory bandwidth for S805 over S801 doesn't really benefit the CPU cores:
Geekbench 3.0 | |||||
Snapdragon 801 2.3GHz (HTC M8) | Snapdragon 805 2.7GHz (MDP/T) | % Increase for S805 | |||
Overall (Single thread) | 1001 | 1049 | 4.8% | ||
Overall (Multi-threaded) | 2622 | 2878 | 9.7% | ||
Integer (Single thread) | 956 | 996 | 4.2% | ||
Integer (Multi-threaded) | 2999 | 3037 | 1.3% | ||
FP (Single thread) | 843 | 925 | 9.7% | ||
FP (Multi-threaded) | 2636 | 3155 | 19.7% | ||
Memory (Single thread) | 1411 | 1406 | 0% | ||
Memory (Multi-threaded) | 1841 | 1949 | 6% |
I wouldn't read too much into the multithreaded FP results, I suspect we're mostly seeing differences in thermal dissipation of the two test units. A closer look at the memory bandwidth numbers confirms that while the 805 has more memory bandwidth, most of it is reserved for GPU use:
Geekbench 3.0 - Memory Bandwidth | |||||
Snapdragon 801 2.3GHz (HTC M8) | Snapdragon 805 2.7GHz (MDP/T) | % Increase for S805 | |||
Stream Copy (Single thread) | 7.89 GB/s | 8.04 GB/s | 1.9% | ||
Stream Copy (Multi-threaded) | 9.53 GB/s | 10.1 GB/s | 5.9% | ||
Stream Scale (Single thread) | 5.36 GB/s | 5.06 GB/s | - | ||
Stream Scale (Multi-threaded) | 7.31 GB/s | 7.63 GB/s | 4.3% | ||
Stream Add (Single thread) | 5.27 GB/s | 5.2 GB/s | - | ||
Stream Add (Multi-threaded) | 6.84 GB/s | 7.51 GB/s | 9.8% | ||
Stream Triad (Single thread) | 5.64 GB/s | 5.85 GB/s | 3.7% | ||
Stream Triad (Multi-threaded) | 7.65 GB/s | 7.89 GB/s | 3.1% |
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bradleyg5 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
http://imgur.com/a/fkUhfCharts!
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
Broken links!hardeswm - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Anand,Would you consider including at least 1 Intel/AMD 'cost-effective' cpu, integrated graphics, and 'cost-effective' discrete gpu in these charts? A price per chip comparison would be very cool as well.
I am really interested in watching the performance gap close over the next year.
Thanks!
texasti89 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Nice GPU features & moderate performance bump. Not impressive, though. This release shows how bad we need to migrate to the next 20nm process node. Industry has done all they can to squeeze the heck out of current 28nm node. It's really frustrating to observe this stagnation of process technology.
rocketbuddha - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
IMHO, I do not think 805 will get much in the area of phones. Manufacturing wise it is more expensive. It needs to have a separate Gobi MDM to provide LTE connectivity. Instead the cheaper integrated 800/801 which are MSMs will continue to be used.IT could very well be a repeat of Q3-12-Q2-13 where in when the first QC Kraits appeared sans the integrated baseband.
That was a brief window of time that Note 2 as well as HTC One X+ sported Exynos and Tegra 3+ variants as the SOC and plus a Gobi MDM for LTE connectivity. So maybe Note 4 would have the next Exynos version with the Gobi MDM for the US version of the handset.
Tanclearas - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Is that really correct that Snapdragon 808/810 will revert back to 2 x 32b memory interface? That doesn't seem right.frostyfiredude - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
810 is 2x32b LPDDR4 1600. 25.6GB/s, same as 805808 is 2x32b LPDDR3 933. 14.9GB/s, less than the others but still quite a lot of BW considering the GPU is smaller too.
Tanclearas - Friday, May 23, 2014 - link
The combination of a new 64-bit core and higher clocked GPU (note that the 810 shows Adreno 430) will put additional strain on the memory bandwidth. I think I'd rather see 4x32b LPDDR3 933.frostyfiredude - Friday, May 23, 2014 - link
Considering the hugely more powerful APUs from AMD and Intel are happy with 25.6GB/s using architectures which are less bandwidth conscientious; I'm sure these Snapdragons will be limited by thermals far before memory.vortmax2 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link
Bring on the Note 4 with this!