Understanding Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810: Performance Preview
by Joshua Ho & Andrei Frumusanu on February 12, 2015 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- Gobi
- Snapdragon 810
Final Words
In light of everything, it seems that Snapdragon 810 was not as the rumors claimed. In my experience, I didn’t notice any of the development devices getting hotter than what I’d come to expect from a modern SoC. In most cases, it appears that CPU performance is about what we’d expect from a cluster of four Cortex A57s at 2 GHz, although there are a few anomalous results that could be a concern. If anything, it’s clear that the CPU isn’t really an area of weakness on the Snapdragon 810, especially with all of the work that Qualcomm has done for an energy aware scheduler to maximize the performance and efficiency of their big.LITTLE implementation.
Outside of the CPU, it’s evident that Qualcomm will retain their traditional lead in the modem and RF space, as OEMs will continue to adopt parts of RF360 along with Qualcomm modems and transceivers to ensure maximum performance on flagship smartphones and other high-end mobile devices. I don’t believe any other company will really be able to beat Qualcomm in this space, as they strongly emphasized just how well-validated their modems are and the extent to which they implement standards properly to work with operators around the world without issue.
While my time with the Snapdragon 810 hasn’t revealed any significant issues, the real concern here seems to be more along the lines of the GPU performance. While ALU performance and compute performance in general are significantly improved with the Adreno 430, the performance uplift doesn’t really seem to be as large as one might hope. Although Qualcomm is trying to sell the idea of a 4K tablet with the Snapdragon 810, it feels as if it’s too early to try and drive such high resolutions when the GPU can’t handle it. In order to see an appreciable increase in performance this year, it’s likely that OEMs will need to stay with 1080p or at most QHD display resolutions to really deliver improved graphics performance for gaming and other GPU intensive use cases.
As we’ve mentioned before, it seemed that Qualcomm stumbled a bit with the launch of Apple’s A7 SoC. While it seemed that Snapdragon 810 might have relatively little competitive advantage over other SoCs, in the past few months it’s become clear that Qualcomm has been leveraging their strengths to ensure that they remain a strong choice for SoCs this year. Although the GPU and memory subsystem appear to be a bit weak, overall 2015 remains promising for Android flagships, even if an OEM can’t design their own SoC.
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PC Perv - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Did review state on what OS the benchmarks were run? KitKat, Lollipop, 64-bit/32-bit, etc.? Sorry if I missed it.Gigaplex - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Why go through all that detail on how their software stack for big.LITTLE improves over stock ARM, without testing to see if it works? The Exynos article the other day showed that big.LITTLE flat out didn't work, performing worse than parking on little cores but consuming more energy. Does Qualcomms one actually improve things here?bigstrudel - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
I'm beyond skeptical of 810's performance under actual thermal constraints like inside a flagship smartphone.PC Perv - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
I am not sure how useful those system-level benches (Basemark, 3DMark) are to compare different platforms. On same platform (OS), I can see the value.HisDivineOrder - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Given all the press runs (here, PCper) Qualcomm are doing, the loss of that Samsung contract must have REALLY got someone's knickers in a twist.blzd - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Good article. Thanks for including some S800 devices in some of the device comparisons, more of that (older SoC for comparison) please if you can.tuxRoller - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
I'll say this once again: email Rob Clark of red hat. He's been working on a clean-room implementation of adreno (https://github.com/freedreno/freedreno) for a few years and has gotten quite far (gl 2.1/gl|es 2.0, iirc).He's a super nice guy, and given that Qualcomm has been contributing, a bit, to his project he may be loathe to harm the relationship, but, if nothing else, you can read through his repo to understand the arch.
aryonoco - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Fantastic preview, thanks guys, it's been great at AT over the last couple of weeks!Just a note, in future and especially when reviewing shipping devices, could you pay some attention to the 2-year upgrade performance improvement as well? Most people (in the developed world at least) seem to be on 2-year upgrade cycles, and so it makes sense to compare the current generation to the phone that's in their hand. AT does this for desktop/laptop CPUs and GPUs (for example informing people that if you already have Ivy Bridge, there's not much performance to be gained by Haswell etc) so it would be great it if that coverage extends to mobile platforms as well (for example comparing SD810 with SD600 and the level of improvement one might expect between them).
wyewye - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Why no Wifi tests?You say it supports MU-MIMO and 801.22ad, but anywhere else I read only "ac" and MU-MIMO is supported.
PC Perv - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Page 6, after the Geekbench floating-point chart, you said:"In this case Snapdragon 810 performance is relatively close to Exynos 5433 performance even though it has the advantage of running in AArch64 mode, which should give the FP numbers a boost over the Exynos. This is likely an isolated case where the Krait architecture and Snapdragon 805's high clock speed play to its favor."
And I have no idea what you are saying. I do not want to sound rude, but this kind of writing is what I saw from previous articles written by Mr. Ho (and Mr. Chester).