Today, Qualcomm announced a number of details in the Snapdragon 820, specifically about their Kryo CPU. Given that the Snapdragon 810 was a somewhat standard 4x Cortex-A57/4x Cortex-A53, it was clear that that this chip was a stop-gap for a future fully custom design. With the Snapdragon 820 announcement, the first major bit of information that we received was that this would be a return to a custom CPU core design, and today Qualcomm is finally unveiling a bit more information on Kryo.

The two main spec details that are being disclosed today is that the quad-core Kryo CPU in Snapdragon 820 will reach up to 2.2 GHz, and that the SoC will be manufactured on Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process. It isn’t stated whether this is the 14LPP process, which will give up to 10% transistor performance improvement over 14LPE which was seen in chips like the Exynos 7420, but it’s a safe bet that it is. As a result of the new architecture and new process node, Qualcomm is claiming up to a 2x increase in performance and up to a 2x increase in power efficiency compared to Snapdragon 810.

The final part of this announcement is Symphony System Manager, which is said to be designed to deal with heterogeneous compute in an efficient manner. This is likely to be a kernel-level mechanism that ensures that the SoC is well-optimized for use in a smartphone or any other application. Given the focus on heterogeneous compute for this launch, I wonder if Qualcomm is going for some form of heterogeneous CPU design as well.

Source: Qualcomm

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  • Wolfpup - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link

    Running (almost) real Windows 8.1 vs Android on the same Tegra 3 SOC, Windows runs fine, feels fine, aside from some websites with really crazy scripting. Android on the other hand is a sluggish mess on that same hardware...which is a joke given we're talking about a full OS being used as a desktop versus an incredibly stripped down phone thing.
  • tuxRoller - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link

    I don't know what "(almost) real" means, nor "stripped down phone thing".
    The T3 was always an issue because of bandwidth to the gpu so a less graphically intense os would definitely run better. Also the storage matters A LOT. Unless you are running them on the same device you can't really compare. The same soc isn't enough.
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link

    Can you please provide evidence for your claims? Without a doubt the efficiency claims are simply incorrect unless you mean something different than "getting X amount of work done while using Y amount of energy".
  • Wolfpup - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link

    Apple tech? Less adaptable? Android is just kind of a kludgy, gross mess that's really inefficient compared with Windows NT.
  • tuxRoller - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link

    What do you mean by "kludgy, gross" and "inefficient"?
  • sonicmerlin - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link

    Windows Phone is "much less adaptable"? It runs on the same frickin' kernel as desktop Windows.

    The reason Android still lags and will forever lag is because it doesn't prioritize the UI thread, so anything that runs in the background can interrupt the animations and block out the user's touch input.
  • tuxRoller - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link

    It won't forever lag, but, as I said elsewhere, Linux designs for throughout first. So it didn't weight niceness as much as it could if it were using the strictest priorities the rt patches provide.
  • nidz109 - Saturday, September 26, 2015 - link

    >doesn't prioritize the UI

    This was proven to be false. You don't know what you're talking about.
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link

    Is there any mention of sensorcore, by the way?
  • Pessimism - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link

    Wake me when they make one of these that can run 100% duty cycle without throttling inside a cell phone.

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