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The Snapdragon 820 packs an Adreno 530 GPU, which promises a performance uplift in the region of 40% increase. It will also utilise the new LPDDR4 RAM memory standard and support a raft of new hardware capabilities like 4K video at 60fps and DSLR-like photography.
With the Snapdragon 810, Qualcomm ditched its own custom Krait core architecture in favour of ARM’s big.LITTLE octa-core setup, however, with the Snapdragon 820 Qualcomm will debut the successor architecture to Krait, dubbed Kryo. Not a great deal has been revealed about this other than it being 64-bit and part of Qualcomm’s Zeroth cognitive computing platform.
What’s cognitive computing? Well it’s a bit full-on to be honest but in very simplistic terms it’s essentially an attempt to make a computer processor work more like the human brain in terms of efficiency. On a practical level it’s also supposed to be more intelligent and to be able to better anticipate a users’ needs.
If you walk into your house or switch on your phone and it just does all the things you like, how much better is that? Qualcomm even mentioned the possibility of Zeroth recognising facial expressions, so in theory if your phone starts playing a song you don’t like it could realise straight away and skip it just from that grimace you pulled.
Snapdragon 820 WILL Support INSANE 600Mbps LTE-A Speeds
As you expect, the Snapdragon 820 runs LTE-A. But unlike previous versions the chipset will support up to 600Mbps, a HUGE uplift over last year’s 450Mbps record. This is all made possible by Qualcomm’s newly upgraded X12 LTE modem, which also bumps uplink speeds to 150Mbps.
“This is the first publicly announced processor for use in mobile devices to support LTE Category 12 in the downlink and Category 13 in the uplink,” said Qualcomm at launch, “providing up to 33 percent and 200 percent improvement over its predecessor’s download and upload speeds, respectively.”
But That’s Not All…
The Snapdragon 820 also features a bunch of new technologies that make your LTE and Wi-Fi connections work more effectively together. Qualcomm outlined the below during launch:
- LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U). The Snapdragon 820 processor is the first publicly announced processor for use in mobile devices to offer comprehensive LTE-U support when paired with the WTR3950, increasing mobile network capacity and user throughput by aggregating LTE in licensed and unlicensed bands.
- LTE and Wi-Fi Link Aggregation (LWA). LWA is another method of aggregating licensed and unlicensed spectrum. It is designed to allow mobile operators to utilize their Wi-Fi infrastructure to augment licensed LTE network capacity with unlicensed spectrum capacity.
- Next-generation Wi-Fi calling. The X12 LTE modem supports next-generation HD Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Video over LTE (ViLTE) calling services using the IP Multimedia Subsystem, with support for call continuity between LTE and Wi-Fi. Making use of the cognitive capabilities of Qualcomm® Zeroth™, the X12 LTE modem monitors real-time Wi-Fi quality to decide if and when to shift the call from LTE to Wi-Fi or back.
- Antenna sharing. The new modem supports several antenna sharing schemes between LTE and Wi-Fi, designed to make it easier for manufacturers to design devices with advanced technologies like LTE-U, 4x4 LTE MIMO, and 2-stream Wi-Fi, with attractive form factors and minimal performance impact on either technology.
- 40% lower power consumption and 40% faster performance for both graphics and GPGPU compute when compared to the Adreno 430;
- OpenGL ES 3.1+AEP (Android Extension Pack) support, Renderscript, as well as the new OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan standards (Vulkan, in case you were wondering, minimizes driver overhead and enables multi-threaded performance on mobile devices;
- Support for 64-bit virtual addressing, meaning shared virtual memory (SVM) and efficient co-processing with 64 bit CPUs;
- Fine-grain power management, new rendering, compositing and compression techniques to enable higher performance at lower power consumption and reduced DRAM bandwidth;
- And last but by no means least, 4K HEVC video support at 60fps.
Qualcomm’s cognitive compute processors are coming to Snapdragon 820 | ExtremeTech
