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
GPU Performance
Shifting gears, let’s take a look at GPU performance. As we mentioned earlier, Qualcomm isn’t disclosing much about this GPU other than that it packs quite a bit more computational power than its predecessor and should be quite a bit faster in the process. This points to a potentially significant architectural shift, but that determination will have to wait for another time.
Starting with 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, the performance honestly doesn’t start out great. The overall score is significantly influenced by the physics score, which in turn is more concerned with the number of cores and their throughput on simple code than the ability to extract complex IPC. As a result the 4 CPU core 820 simply can’t catch up with the likes of the Samsung devices and their high-clocked big.LITTLE configurations. On the other hand the graphics score makes this the fastest Android phone to date, though relative to the 810 Mi Note Pro, perhaps not by a ton. Ultimately as this is an OpenGL ES 2.x test it’s not the most strenuous of tests these days, and comments from Qualcomm indicate that it may be a CPU-limited test on 820.
GFXBench on the other hand shows some massive gains for the 820 relative to any other Android device. In offscreen rendering mode, all 3 game tests – Manhattan ES 3.1, Manhattan ES 3.0, and T-Rex HD – put the 820 MDP/S as being 52% (or more) faster than the next-fastest Android device, either the 810 based Mi Note Pro or the Exynos 7420 based Samsung Galaxy Note 5. The single biggest jump we see is with Manhattan ES 3.0 at 72%, while the ES 3.1 version dials that back down to 52%. Even the iPhone 6s Plus, well known for its powerful GPU, is handily and consistently surpassed by the 820 here. Only due to the 6s Plus’s lower rendering resolution of 2208x1242 does it surpass the MDP/S in onscreen tests, as the latter needs to render at 2560x1600 (~50% more pixels). Qualcomm was aiming for some big GPU performance gains here and so far they are delivering.
Curiously, GFXBench’s synthetic feature tests don’t show the same gains. Offscreen ALU performance is only slightly improved over the 810 (10%) or in the case of texturing is an outright regression. None-the-less full gaming performance is clearly in the 820’s favor. I’ve long suspected that the Adreno 430 GPU in the 810 had some kind of architectural bottleneck – perhaps an ALU/texture array that was difficult to fully utilize – and what we’re seeing here would back up that claim, as if that was the case then correcting it would have allowed Qualcomm to significantly boost their rendering performance while only barely changing their synthetic performance. Otherwise I find it a bit surprising that the driver overhead score is a bit worse on 820 than 810, which may be a result of the immature GPU drivers on this early device.
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Rixxos - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
All in all the preliminary results show some impressive performance gains over the older generation of socs in Android phones. Especially the memory bandwidth and gpu performance seems much better. I don't see the A9 as a direct competitor as it is on a whole different OS and I doubt anyone who ever jumps over to a different OS does this as a result of CPU benchmark scores. I expect the Samsung M1 soc to step it up even a bit more especially in multithreaded benchmarks because of the extra cores. All in all it seems 2016 will finaly again be a decent year for Android phones in terms of high end socs. I just hope all this extra power and efficiency won't go wasted on useless gimmicks such as qhd or 4k screens. (VR apllications aside).bushgreen - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
Does it use all 4 cores at the same time? 2 of these cores is enough it will not throttle at all. Why would u need 4 cores on a phone even all the macbooks except 15" only have 2 cores. They used a big reference phone so the heat can dissapate.bushgreen - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
Does it use all 4 cores at the same time?tipoo - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
In benchmarks it does. The question is how much the governor will do that in real apps.milli - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
Went ahead and made a comparison to the A9 in Geekbench.http://i.imgur.com/Qq4OHys.png
Mondozai - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link
Thanks! Useful stuff. So slower in SP, the most important metric. Disappointing bit expected. This is why Google are launching their SoC initiative.Gunbuster - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft goes with an 820 for their next phone and continues to be hamstrung by a single supplier option or if they get off their duff and compile Win 10 Mobile for X86 Atom in the fabled "Surface Phone"SpartyOn - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link
Based on the rumors I've been reading, sounds like the Atom X3 Surface Phone has been canceled in favor of a newer, upcoming Intel x86 mobile CPU architecture. Personally, I'm still hanging on to my old Lumia 822 until the Surface Phone is released, and I can't be happier if this rumor turns out to be true.The X3 is old school architecture compared to what 2016 ARM CPU's will have, plus it would have totally sucked on the graphics side of things. Braswell arch ups the graphics capabilities, but is lacking on the CPU side, especially in single threaded. I'm hoping for a brand new, previously unannounced Intel x86 for 2016 that will make it into the Surface Phone.
Microsoft can't afford to cripple their premium line with subpar performance, even if does fill the niche of running x86 apps.
Mondozai - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link
Still using L1520 and amazingly happy. WP is so goddamn fluid. Personally not missing any apps.ws3 - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link
I know something me who still uses an original iPhone from 2007. Like your outdated Lumina, it also is very fluid and lacks apps.