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
tipoo - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Unless you have information we don't, we still have no sweet clue about the TDP of the X1. So I'll give that a [citation needed].kron123456789 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Well, there is one clue about that from Nvidia — they claimed that Tegra X1 consumes 10W while running The Elemental demo(which is, considering frame drops, full load of the GPU)tipoo - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Exactly. Way too high for a phone. They'd have to drop wattage by nearly *triple*, so I'm not sure I believe that simply clocking it lower would have them lead on performance per watt.And I hope the 1tflop bogus number wasn't part of ops calculus.
kron123456789 - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - link
You say "drop wattage by nearly *triple*" like other SoCs consumes no more than 3-3.5W.And i think this 1TFLOP isn't bogus, it's just in FP16 mode.
serendip - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
I assume Intel and Nvidia are still behind Qualcomm and Samsung when it comes to integrating LTE capability into their SOCs. Then again, the article mentioned that the power saving from having integrated LTE isn't much compared to other components.Any idea why Samsung went with Intel modems on some Exynos variants? The proliferation of so many LTE bands creates a mess of SKUs. It's interesting that some Galaxy S5 Snapdragon variants have access to TD-LTE, FDD-LTE, CDMA2000, WCDMA and GSM in one device.
hlovatt - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Really liked all the RF info and as you said this RF performance is just as important in overall phone performance as CPU and GPU. Now all we need to know is how it performs in an actual phone.Gunbuster - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Maybe now that we can see this is not blowing other SOC's out of the water the big players can get some good pricing from Qualcomm. Perhaps Microsoft could make a real affordable flagship this time around... (or make the weak ass S4XX affordable flagship actually affordable at $200)tipoo - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Any plans on throttling tests? That was the big controversy, with Samsung rumoured to not use it in the upcoming GS6 because of overheating.JoshHo - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
We intend on doing deep testing of the first S810 phone we get to the bottom of the story.tipoo - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Good to know, looking forward to you guys getting to the bottom of it. I've been wondering if Samsung was just saying that to hype up their own Exynos, or if the other phone manufacturers are going to have problems with S810.