With the 820, Qualcomm also says its ISP will be able to use data from those cameras (along with GPU-accelerated software) to simulate optical zoom rather than the standard digital zoom. Think back to HTC’s One M8-the trick is to use a different focal length for each lens and then combine the images from each camera to simulate a greater depth-of-field that can be tweaked in an image editor. With the 820’s Spectra ISP, Qualcomm continues to push dual rear-camera setups like the ones it began supporting with the Snapdragon 810. The lens and the sensor get most of the attention when you’re talking about smartphone cameras, but it’s important to have a good image signal processor to make sense of all the data. This generally led to mediocre graphics performance in phones like Xiaomi’s Mi 4i, and we’d like Qualcomm to avoid making the same mistake again. That’s going to be an important boost-the 610 and 615 GPUs were faster than those used in the lower-end 410, but the chips ended up in slightly higher-end phones with higher-resolution displays. It told us that these chips should generally also be 40 percent faster and 40 percent more power efficient than their predecessors, the Adreno 405 used in the Snapdragon 610 and 615. Architectural improvements account for the rest of the power savings, including a new “standalone GPU Power Manager” that lets the GPU switch parts of itself on and off more quickly.Īs for the Adreno 510 that will ship with the Snapdragon 618 and 620, the company isn’t giving detailed or specific performance claims. The company says that some of that is due to process improvements-the 820 is being manufactured on an unspecified FinFET process, likely either TSMC’s 16nm process or the 14nm Samsung process that has served the Exynos 7 SoC so well. Qualcomm says that, compared to the Snapdragon 810’s Adreno 430, Adreno 530 improves performance by roughly 40 percent while reducing power consumption by 40 percent. But a new flagship chip isn’t all Qualcomm is going to need to compete in 2016 and beyond. There’s plenty of tech to talk about, and we’ll do that here because that’s what we do. Keep all of this in mind as you read about the Snapdragon 820, which Qualcomm is officially starting to talk about today-we’ve got some details about the GPU and the image signal processor (ISP), though information about the custom Kryo CPU core and other parts of the chip will need to wait.įrom what we’ve seen so far, it looks like a respectable generational leap in both performance and power usage. The wider smartphone market continues to grow, but companies like Xiaomi and Motorola are willing to sell to good-to-great phones for one-third to one-half of what you’d pay for a flagship, and those phones often use lower-end, less-profitable Qualcomm SoCs or chips from an upstart like MediaTek or a newly competitive Intel. Most of the money in consumer electronics is in high-end, high-margin products, but Apple controls an overwhelming amount of that market, and the company only uses Qualcomm’s modems, not the (presumably more expensive and profitable) Snapdragon SoCs. Some of this could be attributed to the 810 specifically, but a lot of it would be happening no matter how good the chip was.
Qualcomm’s outlook for Q4 of 2015 ( PDF) sums it up nicely: there’s “increased concentration” at the high end of the market, pushing out phones that use Snapdragon SoCs (the huge worldwide success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus can be at least partially blamed) “lower demand” for high-end Snapdragons from one of Qualcomm’s major customers (read: Samsung, which is using its own chips in high-end Galaxy phones) and lowered sales of “certain handset models” in China using high-end Snapdragons. It had a gift for generating both heat and bad press, and, while the Snapdragon 808 didn’t suffer from the same problems, it was less of an improvement over older 800-series chips.Īs this has been happening on the technical side, things have been looking less rosy on the financial side. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and 808 will continue to be its flagship chips for the rest of this year, but, as we’ve written, the 810 in particular has been problematic for the company. Further Reading In-depth with the Snapdragon 810’s heat problems