This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Qualcomm835

When Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835 earlier this year, the general conclusion was that the new cadre would feature an improved version of the company's Kryo CPU compages, with better performance thank you to fine-tuning of that design. It turns out that's not the path Qualcomm is taking.

Kryo: Frozen out

The new Snapdragon 835 uses a CPU core that Qualcomm calls the Kryo 280, but that fleck isn't based on its prior Kryo CPU at all. Instead, it'due south a big.Fiddling configuration that Anandtech believes is based on the Cortex-A72 or A73 with four efficiency cores and four high-power cores. Qualcomm is the first major manufacturer to transport a design that takes advantage of ARM'southward new licensing model for the Cortex family.

Historically, ARM has offered ii CPU licenses: Yous could take out a license for a standard Cortex CPU design with no opportunity to deviate from ARM's ready of specifications for that product, or you could license the ARM instruction ready and build any kind of chip you wanted. ARM did allow for some flexibility under this model, in terms of number of cores, big.Little configurations, and total on-board enshroud, only customization opportunities were limited. The new Built On ARM Cortex Technology license allows companies to make more significant deviations from ARM'south base of operations plans without having to build entirely custom chips.

Qualcomm has refused to admit exactly what ARM scrap it used for the Kryo 280'due south base blueprint, but confirmed to Anandtech that the CPU clusters are semi-custom designs and that it built the Snapdragon 835'south memory controllers.

The higher up graph is from Anandtech (they've got a significant amount of criterion data in multiple tests), and it shows a huge leap for the 835 in integer workloads, especially when compared with the original Kryo. Where Kryo excels, on the other mitt, is in floating point calculations; the Snapdragon 821 is 1.23x faster than its next-closest competitor. Retentiveness operations on the 835 are significantly faster than the older Kryo processor, and overall system benchmarks show pregnant uplift as well.

GPU functioning is also by and large stronger, though much of the gain is delivered through a straight frequency increment. Overall testing showed a significant decrease in power consumption besides, with fixed workload power consumption on a reference SD820 device at 4.6W and SD835 at three.56W.

In retrospect, I tin't help wondering if the Snapdragon 821's high floating-point performance was related to Qualcomm's server ambitions. The company'southward Falkor CPU core is said to be derived from its Snapdragon family (with some tweaks and changes) and strong floating-indicate performance would brand the chip more than effective in some HPC workloads. We won't know if this is true until Qualcomm's Falkor is available for testing, simply it's not implausible — like other ARM vendors, Qualcomm has focused on ramping upwards overall CPU density, and a mobile chip with intrinsically low power consumption is a expert starting betoken to deliver on such a design.

Either way, the Snapdragon 835 looks like a solid improvement on the 820 and 821, even if Qualcomm is stepping away from its own core designs and towards something more in-line with ARM's stock Cortex architecture.