There are a lot of companies making System-on-Chips (SoCs) for Android smartphones, but Qualcomm is the 800-pound gorilla among them. When it has a good year, the entire Android ecosystem has a good year. But 2015 has been anything but a good year for the American telecom hardware giant. First, it had to abandon the Krait processor architecture used in the Snapdragon 805 and adopt stock Cortex cores from ARM in an effort to close the gap to Apple which had already made the leap to 64-bit processing with its A7 SoC. Then, the flagship Snapdragon 810 SoC quickly picked up a reputation for being a dragon that just wouldn’t stop breathing fire.
Although it offered significant improvements in areas like graphics processing and data transmission, overheating issues meant that manufacturers had to either throttle performance levels, go with a lower-spec’d processor like the 808 or build their own like Samsung did with the Exynos 7420.
From the smouldering ashes of the 810 rises Qualcomm’s first SoC to feature a custom-designed 64-bit processor – named Kryo. The Snapdragon 820, which will attempt to retake the flagship market in 2016, dumps the octa-core design of the 810 in favour of four Kryo cores in clusters of two. The SoC will be manufactured using Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process, which should – in combination with a design that uses fewer and more efficient cores – alleviate the overheating issues that plagued the 810.
Qualcomm claims the Kryo cores will be twice as fast and twice as efficient as the Cortexes. This will be a hard sell for the marketing department, since core count – like clock speed in the decades past – has become essential to the consumer’s perception of a smartphone’s capabilities. However, considering that a very small proportion of apps are actually optimised to take advantage of 8 discrete cores, it is very likely that the 820 could yield better results on fewer cores than the 810.
In fact, the results of initial benchmark tests from various sources indicate that the Snapdragon 820 trounces its predecessor by a sound margin in both single-core and multi-core performance. The margin of victory varies, as usual, depending on the benchmark used. The new Adreno 530’s graphics processing unit (GPU) also offers significant improvements over this year’s 430 (40% according to Qualcomm). The only chipset currently in production that appears to be in the same league as the 820 is Apple’s A9 – early signs indicate that the Qualcomm has slightly lower overall performance, but better graphics processing.
Qualcomm also claims that the Snapdragon 820 heralds improvements in the areas of digital signal processing (3x performance, 10x efficiency), data transmission (33% performance, 20% efficiency) and image signal processing.
However, the new Cortex A72 processor is being touted to match Kryo and companies like Huawei and MediaTek could provide stiff competition using ARM designs. In the chipset business, where standing still is going backwards and going forward slightly is only equivalent to standing still, Qualcomm knows that merely bettering its own mark from last year will not be enough to maintain its dominance. The proof of the pudding will be in the first production phone. Until then, if you’re thinking about an expensive flagship purchase, consider holding off.