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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phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Asus ZenPhone 2 uses an Intel chipset.There's a couple of other ones as well.
blanarahul - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
It's probably at Snapdragon 800 level. Intel won't compete with S810 and best Exynos' of the world until Airmont.... Well, atleast I hope so. *sigh*serendip - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Intel on Android also has problems with app compatibility and speed, despite Intel's assurances to the contrary. Apps with ARM-compiled native codeserendip - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Apps with ARM-compiled native code either don't run or run slowly under the code translator. It's almost like Intel is giving away these phone and tablet Atom SOCs to get a foot in the mobile market. I'm quite happy with my cheap Windows 8.1 tablet but Android on Intel has a way a to go yet.(the lack of comment editing isn't fun, especially when the Submit Comment button is so easy to click)
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
That's for (mainly) games developed using the Android NDK, correct? Doesn't the switch to the Android RunTime (ART) and pre-compiling the apps at install time mitigate this? Or does ART not apply to NDK apps?jjj - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Look at the phrasing from 2 articles at just a few days distancein this one - Thanks in large part to the new cryptographical capabilities of the ARMv8 cores, Snapdragon 810 gets off to a very good start in Geekbench 3's integer benchmarks ....Snapdragon 810's overall performance improvement here is a rather large 45%, though if we throw out the especially large gains that come from Lua MT, the overall performance advantage is closer to 30%.
and from the Note 4 - GeekBench's integer benchmarks paint a similar picture - if we disregard the huge boost to the cryptography scores we see an average advantage of 31% for the Exynos 5433's A57 cores, or 29% when we normalize for clock speeds.
So for the Note they clearly point out and discard the encryption gains and they normalize for clocks. That's good and fair and the proper way to look at it. (although quantifying the importnace of the encryption gains would be a plus).
Here not only encryption is left alone but clocks are not even mention, some readers might not be even aware that there is a clock difference.
The tone and objectivity are fundamentally different, a nice review for the Note while here it's all about easing concerns and making SD810 look good.
Sushisamurai - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
+1. It's not unethical, because it's on a reference platform that Qualcomm is sourcing out. It'd be "unethical" (your terms, not mine - I would use the word disappointing) if they didn't give investigate throttling and power for actual, retail/shipping devices. But I haven't been disappointed yet so....gonchuki - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
2015 was already going to be a good skip year with flagships already going full retard at 6'' in late 2014 and already gimping the specs of 5'' phones just to increase the sales of their higher margin phablets.Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
I added the clocks for the CPU, apologies the article was still being edited when published.As for power and thermals, we have no way to test these until we get a shipping review device with the SoC. Josh had only a couple of hours on hand with the MDP, making more extensive testing not possible. Calling that unethical is pretty harsh.
warreo - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Andrei, power and thermals aside, I notice you didn't address why there was not a greater focus on Exynos vs. S810? At bare minimum, you should include the % difference in the table in addition to the difference vs. S805. The absence of any kind of discussion there makes it easy for people to cry unethical, NOT the absence of power and thermals, which as you said, was due to lack of testing time.