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 - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - link
Not an accurate description of the state of affairs. It is because Apple has the power over the carriers that other OEMs lack. I wish Congress can intervene in the situation and rein in on the carriers. That will not only benefit the U.S. consumers but also potentially influence the world market.Absolutely not "because Apple spend more money and Android OEMs do not want to spend money"
name99 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
"While there are multiple solutions to solving the power problem that comes with OoOE, ARM currently sees big.LITTLE as the best solution. "I can't help but think (based on all the evidence we've seen so far) that big.LITTLE is the VLIW of low energy CPUs. Just like VLIW would be totally awesome if we could only solve those pesky compiler issues (which are just out of reach, but maybe next year...), so big.LITTLE would be awesome if we could only solve those pesky scheduler issues (which will, likewise, maybe be solved next year...)
It's nice that QC claim they have a better scheduler; it would be even nicer if they were confident enough about it to provide actual power/energy NUMBERS...
TT Masterzz - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
Amazing article. Although to be frank I hardly understood the antenna part. It would be amazing if the authors at Anand Tech make an article explaining the RF system/modems/naming scheme and baseband processors in depth. Also an article explaining some terms like CPU pipeline length/branch mispredict would be amazing.Laststop311 - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
All this is telling me is that it can barely beat last generation exynos. The exynos 7 most likely stomps this in performance which is why samsung had to go qwith it for all countries. People would be too mad if only S Korea got the super fast exynos 7 and every 1 else got the slower 810. Before snapdragon had the slioght performance edge but looks like exynos may finally be the better chip.That is untile qualcomm busts out their custom made 64 bit krait that just wasnt ready in time so they had to use standard arm cores to get 64 bit to market faster. Custom Kraint 64 whatever they call it it krait 500 or something will most likely beat exynos again.
Zingam - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Will these be DX12, OpenGL Next compatible, or will we have to wait for another 5 years for sufficient market penetration.Keermalec - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
So The 1-year old Nvidia K1 trounces the yet to arrive snapdragon 810...And yes, LTE is not integrated into the K1 in order for OEMS to have a choice between wifi or wifi+LTE tablet versions. Nvidia CAN integrate LTE in the SoC as they have done with the Tegra 4i. It was just sound business practice not to do so with the more powerful chip.
radeonex - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
I want to point out that for linear amplifier circuits, most of the transistors operation in the saturated region (they do not act as switches but rather voltage controlled current sources). The high electron mobility helps with trans-conductance and other characteristics especially in the context of combating short-channel effects (helps smaller devices). It also helps to reduce the minimum voltage drop required to keep the saturated transistors in the correct region of operation.Ning3n - Monday, July 27, 2015 - link
To give a "joe sixpack" review of the 810. I recently replaced my HTC M7 with an M9....As far as I've seen/noticed, the 810 (combined with the 430 GPU), is *ROUGHLY* 15-20% faster than the 600 series I've upgraded from.
Gaming performance (for a cellular device) is great! But, it took over an hour to encrypt just under 5Gb of mp3s, and 1.5Gb of pictures.
Hardly a "phenomenal" improvement.
b.akhil96 - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
How do you categorize the loads ? max(avg,recent) policy when loads are categorized as peak or non peak . what would be an ideal policy to be applied on Moderate loads. (similar to max(avg,recent) )