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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warreo - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link
HAHAHA Tchamber you are a jewel. Thanks for making my morning. Here I was wondering if a week later anybody else had anything intelligent to say....Your analogy of the 5433 as a Lamborghini and the Snapdragons as Corvette/Camaro/GT500 is horrible. Period. Anybody who reads this site should know that. If you really want to get into an argument with someone, you should actually know what you're talking about before insulting them.
As for me, I wasn't talking to down to anyone. I gave AT my observations and also did in fact summarize my own conclusions if you'd bothered to read my comments in totality. Just because I disagree with them doesn't mean I'm talking down to them. You, however, should run along back to pre-school and learn how not to be a prick to others.
djvita - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
found some typoslast paragraph GPU performance "Qualcomm has narrowedmuch"
CPU performance
PNG Comp ST 0.82 MP/s 1110 MP/s 1.11 MP/s 35%
is 1110 correct? found the difference to be very high....
All in all, preliminar benchamrks looks good. Seems anandtech will need a flex2/mi note pro or the upcoming htc m9 in MWC (for sony no rumors, until july i think, lg g4 maybe in may. S6 wont be qualcomm)
Ratman6161 - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Another typo:There are three tables at the top of the CPU Performance page. The last column in the first table says: Snapdragon % Advantage which clearly isn't correct because just in the first line the Samsung has about a 2 to one advantage it says the snapdragon advantage is 608%. I assume you actually meant this column to say but S810 > S805 % Advantage like in the second two tables.
djvita - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
they fixed them all now, it was 1.11SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Very interesting article. Do you think it is possibile the Galaxy S6 devices will use the MDM9x45 modem?deathBOB - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Subjective impressions? Andrei pointed out that the Exynos was subjectively faster than the 805. How does the 810 fare?MrCommunistGen - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Thanks for the informative article! The scope of the article as a whole goes far beyond a Preview of Snapdragon 810, specifically the sections on RF and Qualcomm's scheduler.That in mind, I'll hold off on passing judgement on S810's performance until we see shipping silicon. Between pre-release drivers and differences in chassis/thermals "Performance Preview" *is* spot on for the whole benchmarks section.
Even though S810 is Qualcomm's stopgap and there's only so much you can do (for better or worse) to the performance of off the shelf A57/A53 cores, I'm glad they're still in the game - or at least not out of it. Even as a preview, it is clear that Adreno 430's performance is more than just an iterative increase over Adreno 420.
Regardless of how S810 shakes out, I'm sure Qualcomm is baking all of their learnings from working on this SoC into their in-house ARMv8-A design
Mr.r9 - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Even though this is a preview and drivers/Kernel will definitely improve....I still feel that the 810 will underwhelm.djvita - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
considering I still have an msm8960 device, this will be a huge jump for me.tviceman - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
This performance preview just reaffirms two of my beliefs.1) It's a shame that Nvidia couldn't get more products with Tegra K1 in it, seeing how K1 has been on the market for many months and generally outperforms the 805 (sometimes by a wide margin)
2) It's a shame that Tegra X1 will likely suffer the same limited release fate that Tegra K1 suffered, even if manufacturers were to downclock Tegra X1 to meet smaller TDP demands. X1, even if downclocked, will run circles around 805.