Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Promises Twice the Performance & Power Efficiency of Snapdragon 810

Qualcomm has provided more details about Snapdragon 820 processor featuring custom-designed 64-bit ARM Kryo cores, an Adreno 530 GPU and an Hexagan 680 DSP, with claims that it should be twice as fast and consume half the power of Snapdragon 810 processor with Cortex A57 and A53 cores. Based on the chart below, it will also be faster than Snapdragon 620 with Cortex A72 and A53 cores.

Snapdragon 820 will feature four Kryo cores (succeeding Krait cores) clocked at up to 2.2 GHz and be manufactured using 14nm FinFET process technology. Adreno 530 GPU is expected to deliver over 40% performance improvement over Adreno 430 GPU while also keeping power consumption 40% lower, a new Spectra camera dual ISP will support 14-bit sensors, and Hexagon 680 DSP adds a separate low power DSP for always-on sensor processing, and support for HVX (Hexagon Vector eXtensions) to be used for advanced imaging and computer vision. This will for example greatly accelerate low light image processing and drastically reduce power consumption for such task since it can be handled by the DSP instead of the CPU.

Low Light Shot (Left) Processed by Hexagon 680 DSP (Right)

Qualcomm also introduced the Symphony System Manager that will make sure the CPU, GPU, DSP or ISP work together as best as possible in order to further improve performance and efficiency.

Snapdragon 820 should be found in devices in H1 2016, and not only in mobile devices, as the company expects the new processor to be used in automotive and embedded applications.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.