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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Uplink10 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
That price is too high and is not intended for manufacturers, Bay Trail chips also have a high price but for the price of Bay Trail chip you get motherboard with Bay Trail chip. Also that chip is an overkill for a tablet, with that much features (vPro-remote bios...) it should be used as a server.metayoshi - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
The price on that website IS for manufacturers:Recommended Customer Price (RCP) is pricing guidance only for Intel products. Prices are for direct Intel customers, typically represent 1,000-unit purchase quantities, and are subject to change without notice. Prices may vary for other package types and shipment quantities. Listing of RCP does not constitute a formal pricing offer from Intel.
Taneli - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
K1 is tablets only with no integrated modem and X1 is closer to 10w TDP so it needs active cooling. The Snapdragon here is a totally different chip. And Apple doesn't sell SOCsdragonsqrrl - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Errr... what? 10W TDP? Link please?kron123456789 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Well, Nvidia claimed that Tegra X1 consumes 10W while running The Elemental demo.jjj - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Funny how you insist in comparing it to the 805 not the 5433 when commenting on the Geekbench results. That kind of behavior shows the desire to please the maker of the product not to inform the users, yet it is a persistent Anandtech problem.Might have missed it but you don't seem to even mention clocks either , the SD 810 is at 2GHz i assume and the Exynos is at 1.9GHz, 5% is plenty. Nothing on throttling ,nothing on power, you basically help them better their damaged image without having the complete data. That's unethical and you just accept being manipulated into it.
As for overheating ,we don't know what clocks they targeted and i haven't noticed any mention of what revision you are testing. For delays,there are already delays (that's not debatable) compared to their most optimistic previously disclosed timing.
Just showing the perf numbers we already knew,without looking beyond that doesn't really help.
A5 - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
I really doubt Qualcomm was going to let them take apart their reference tablet to get power numbers.That said, 2015 seems like a good "skip year" on the Android flagship front unless the Exynos 7420 is a real blockbuster. I don't really see anything in this article that supports the conclusion at the end.
TylerGrunter - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
I fully support you there. Snapdragon 810 seems to be competitive with Exynos 5433 and A8 chips, the sad news is that those are 6 month old and there are not the SoCs it will have to compete with.Exynos 7420 has been a beast in preliminary benchmarks, so I hope for that (or Intel coming with something) not to have what you are calling a "skip year".
And for tablets we'll always have Intel or NVidia.
JimRamK - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
What about Intel chips?A5 - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
AFAIK, they don't have any design wins in phones. I don't think 14nm is going to change that, but we'll see.