The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Performance Preview: Meet Kryo
by Ryan Smith & Andrei Frumusanu on December 10, 2015 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Snapdragon 820
CPU Performance, Cont
Having taken a look at Snapdragon 820 and the Kryo CPU from an architectural perspective, let’s look at our higher level benchmarks. We’ll start as always with the web benchmarks.
There are two things we can immediately take away from these results. The first is that currently Google Chrome is incredibly unoptimized for Kryo, and this is something Qualcomm was also quick to mention. We won’t wax on about this as there’s nothing to say we haven’t said before, but Chrome could certainly stand to implement optimized JS engines sooner.
Otherwise if we look at Qualcomm’s native browser, things are greatly improved. Relative to both the Exynos 7420 (A57) powered Note 5 and the Snapdragon 810 (A57) powered Mi Note Pro, the MDP/S shows a significant lead. In fact it pretty much blows past those devices in Kraken. However while it easily takes the top spot for an Android device, even with Qualcomm’s native browser the 820 isn’t going to be able to catch up to the iPhone 6s Plus and its A9 SoC.
Basemark OS II 2.0 on the other hand is less consistent. The overall score again pegs the MDP/S as the best Android device, and by over 20%. However for reasons yet to be determined, the system score is still below the latest Samsung devices. Instead where the 820 shows a clear lead is with the storage (memory) score and the graphics score. In some cases it’s even beating the iPhone 6s Plus, though overall it will fall short.
Our final system benchmark, PCMark, once again puts the MDP/S in a good light overall, while the individual sub-tests are more widely varied. Likely owing to the same optimization issues that dogged Chrome performance, web browsing performance trails the A57 devices. Meanwhile video playback closely trails the Snapdragon 810 powered HTC One M9, and writing performance won’t quite surpass the Galaxy S6. Where the 820 MDP/S makes up for it is in the photo editing score, which is through the roof. Here Qualcomm’s development device holds a 34% performance lead over the next-fastest device, the 810/A57 based Mi Note Pro.
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bodonnell - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
So let's be honest here. It looks like we are looking at a CPU that can trade blows with the Apple A8 (from 2014) but with a GPU that appears to be at least competitive with and probably has a slight edge over the Apple A9. I was hoping for a little more oomph on the CPU side. Maybe the Samsung's custom M1 cores in the the Exynos 8890 will be more impressive...jasonelmore - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
the GPU cores are blowing A9 out of the water.. it's not slight edge..ciderrules - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
Your concept of "blowing out of the water" appears to be skewed. I didn't know 10% (or so) faster would qualify to make such a statement. bodonnell is more accurate using the term "slightly".jasonelmore - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
GFX Bench Texturing: 20%; GFX Bench ALU: 20% GFX Bench Physics: 18%, All the Offscreen benchmarks 12%,And that's using pre-production chips, with pre-production drivers and software.. Imagine when this thing ships and the software has been optimized.
3dmark is the outlier, and other sites are reporting this is a software driver problem.
bodonnell - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
Are we looking at the same benchmarks? That's sad if you consider that blowing it out of the water.Araa - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
What does a few percents of extra GPU power matter when all the flagships have 2k/4k resolutions? All that matters is on screen performance and sadly it doesn't deliver (and if you count the performance drop after the 5 minutes mark, it doesn't even come close to AX chips)bodonnell - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
That's true, my comment was purely academic in that other things being equal the GPU in the SD 820 appears to be slightly more powerful. It's true that in real world usage the A9 only has to drive up to a 1080p display, whereas 2016 flagships are likely to mostly have 1440p (or higher) displays.bodonnell - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
Also remains to be seen how the SD 820 will throttle in actual devices...jasonelmore - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
and now the apple chip gods don't look so untouchable....ws3 - Thursday, December 10, 2015 - link
Well yeah actually they do.This is non-shipping hardware using carefully selected parts in a large form factor. We don't yet know how the average part out of mass production will perform in actual phones, whether it can deliver sustained performance or throttle quickly, etc.
And despite the carefully selected parts and demo platform designed to make the SoC look it's best, it it beaten across the board by the A9.