Qualcomm sheds last veil from Snapdragon 820

After letting the world in on glimpses of its Snapdragon 820 processor for a few months, Qualcomm has finally taken the lamp out of the basket. The company will have high hopes for the chip: troubles in China, being jilted by Samsung, and talk of overheating in its Snapdragon 810 chips left it with disappointing revenue and …

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubling of processing power?

I read elsewhere about the 820 announcement and it claimed a 40% boost. Doubling sounds more like what they'd need to do to keep it within spitting distance of Apple's A9 (which would be about 10-15% faster than the 820 if it doubled single core performance over the 810)

[Gordon 10]

Re: Doubling of processing power?

Why does it need to keep within spitting distance of an apple chip? Comparing a chip designed to run completely different OSes is pretty pointless. The A9 will never run Android or Linux and the 820 will never run iOS.

Apple will always have a better opportunity to more tightly couple their software and hardware than Qualcomm will.

Comparing their performance is a dubious thing to do - there are too many variables involved.

Better to compare with Samsungs high end Arm processors.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Doubling of processing power?

OK 40% will catch up to Samsung's current Exynos, but they have a new one coming out soon so if they want to win back the business they lost in the S6/Note 5 they'll need that 2x to be true.

[Anonymous Coward]

They need it badly

The 810 has earned a questionable reputation for itself with all the alleged throttling issues. incidentally, I wonder how it will impact sales on the current crop of 'premium' phones like the 950XL, the 6P and the Z5 premium, to name but a few.

I for one, decided to skip the current generation of hand warmers and keep the Z1 alive for a few more months to see what happens.

At least they won't be able to point the finger elsewhere as they are going back to using their own design.

[whoelse]

Re: They need it badly

64 but with custom ARM design this time should see it back on par with the normal quality/increment jump for a major realease. If performance/heat is back on track and the new feature sets work as described, it should ship a *lot* more than the 810. I'm basing this on the new features I read about on XDA: http://www.xda-developers.com/snapdragon-820-debut-qualcomms-comeback-packs-a-big-punch/

Although a lot of that is incidental to me, and I'm surprised it doesn't mention the more interesting "smart protect" behavioural analysis chip-level anti malware. I use Nexus for the sake of reasonable prompt security updates (Nov 1st updates arrived on the 11th OTA, still seems like 10 days too long), and wish the new Nexuses (nexii?) could have caught the 820, as then I'd have the combo of regular patches as well as real time behavioural analysis to catch new threats.