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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
119 Comments
View All Comments
jerrylzy - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
"Yes, but not this chip. It's going to be Qualcomm's main chip in 2015, it's still getting beaten by year old tech."Please specify what "year old tech" is. The first mobile A57 implementation is Exynos 5433, which is by no means a "year old tech." Also, Snapdragon 810 uses a newer revision r1p1. I cannot see your point here.
"Nevertheless, GPU power matters. This SoC will struggle with 4K and its supposed to be the high-end. Disappointing."
If excluding Apple and NVIDIA, Adreno 430 has the highest GPU power in mobile space. It also has much higher power efficiency compared to ARM Mali-T760 implementations. Adreno 430 may not be competent enough in tablet space, but it is one of the best smartphone GPU available right now.
jerrylzy - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
I also doubt whether 4K display will appear any time soon on 5.5" or smaller phones.mkozakewich - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Also, it'll do just fine on 4K. The benchmarks were running complex graphical scenes, like games, but most games run at lower resolutions anyway.Ethos Evoss - Sunday, February 22, 2015 - link
Yeah they just tricking putting best HW into smartphones WHICH ppl will NEVER use like LTE Cat 6 yeah OK .. please qualcom show me who supports it RIGHT now that I can fully use it ..And they implementing cat 9 jesus christ wich will be standard like within 5-10 years ?
Come ooon qualcom wha for ?
Packing so many things in SoC we wont even use it within 5 years..
and exactly battery stay last half day right ?
douglord - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
VERY disappointing performance. This will be crushed by the IPhone 7 in both CPU and GPU. And this can't even compete with K1 in the tablet market. The X1 should own the Android tablet space.kron123456789 - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Yeah, it should, but unfortunately it won't. Just like previous Tegra chips. Tegra X1 still has impressive GPU performance though.JarredWalton - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Tegra X1 needs to get power far lower to be in most tablets and smartphones, and given the lack of success with getting Tegra K1 into lots of devices I wouldn't expect X1 to fare any better.blanarahul - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
AnandTech's opinion on big.LITTLE vs. Qualcomm's, Intel's and Apple's approach.blaktron - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Won't high end Android tablets start shipping with Core-M chips this year? If not, why not? There isn't any technical reason. There really isn't any way for other SoC makers to catch up with manufacturers moving to big chips...kron123456789 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
The Core-M chip costs $281 per unit.http://ark.intel.com/products/family/83613/Intel-C...
That's why nobody will put it in a tablet with price less than $1000. And this is too much for Android tablet, even high-end.