It's no secret that Qualcomm is working on the Snapdragon 820, the mobile processor set to replace the 810 as the company's flagship system-on-chip. Small details about each individual component have been drip-fed to the tech press for months, but today Qualcomm finally showed off the whole package.
Taking to the stage in a converted warehouse in Manhattan's Chelsea district, company President Derek Aberle revealed that the Snapdragon 820 will be far more than a smartphone chip; the primary aim of the design team was to bring the mobile experience to everything, from handhelds and IOT to cars, home appliances and beyond. This made low power compute capabilities a priority, as well as various kinds of connectivity and the ability to scale with each form factor. It's also not enough to have great CPU, GPU, camera or modem; they must all work well as a unit.
These demands look to have been delivered, with every part of the SoC using new components that make the 820 more powerful, more thermally efficient and with better battery life than any previous Snapdragon chip. It's the first to be manufactured on a 14nm process, with the 64-bit Krio processor providing the grunt while staying cooler than the 810 - a critical point, considering the negative feedback from customers and manufacturers that struggled with overheating issues on the outgoing chip.
Efficiency improvements should mean power consumption is 40% less, too, which will mean much greater battery life. That's a huge jump, considering the 805 and 810 were roughly 5 and 10% more efficient than the Snapdragon 801. Support for QuickCharge 3.0 will also mean you're back up and running sooner when you do eventually run out of power.
The processor also supports Qualcomm's Smart Protect, a combination of hardware and software security features including content protection, fingerprint scanner capabilities and machine learning to defeat malware.
The Adreno 530 GPU has seen improvements to performance as well as power consumption. It should draw 40% less power than the Adreno 430 in the 810, but provide up to 40% more power at the same time. I was shown an image of a room, rendered to near photo-realism using the GPU and Unreal Engine 4, with phyisically based rendering correctly showing light and shadow interacting with different materials.
VP of product marketing Tim McDonough went into more detail about the X12 LTE Modem, which will support category 12 LTE and even takes 4G connectivity into currently unlicensed frequency bands (LTE-U). That means Snapdragon 820-equipped devices will be capable of 600Mbps downlink and 150Mbps uplink speeds over a mobile connection - that's faster than many home Wi-Fi routers. Wi-Fi hotspots will require less power, too, so you'll be able to put those speeds to good use with multiple devices.
Other connectivity improvements include multi-user MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which better shares wireless bandwidth from a router or access point between devices, and support for the forthcoming 802.11ad protocol. This has yet to be ratified, but to put the potential speed increase into perspective, the fastest 802.11ac speeds need 8x8 MIMO, with 256 QAM modulation four bonded 40 MHz channels. 802.11ad can match those speeds with one spatial stream and 64 QAM modulation on a single channel.
Qualcomm is convinced it has made massive strides with its camera ISP that it has given it a name - Spectra. It has been tweaked for better low light performance this year, with extra processing eliminating noise without taking longer to show the captured image. A new addition is Heterogeneous Signal Processing, which analyses a scene and correctly balances the light correctly. It's an alternative to HDR that doesn't take multiple images, but correctly exposes both the foreground and the background in a sunset, for example.
Machine learning also comes into play here, with the Zeroth scene detection algorithm finding skies, water, people and other objects in your images to automatically tag and organise them. It can be trained to recognise specific objects, for example knowing that sushi is different from a burrito, and it runs on the device rather than the cloud so you aren't using mobile data to get your results.
Finally, the Hexagon 680 DSP has been developed with virtual reality in mind. It supports recording and playing back directional 3D audio, with speaker virtualisation able to create the impression of multi-channel surround sound in a handheld device.
"Your next phone must be better to be worth the cost of the upgrade. Incrementalism isn’t enough - a millimetre thinner, 10% better battery life isn’t worth it," McDonough explained. Qualcomm thinks that all these improvements add up to make a desirable whole, and that you'll be able to justify buying a new phone or tablet once Snapdragon 820-powered devices arrive. With over 60 companies already planning to support the hardware, you may not have long to wait before that becomes a possibility.
I'm about to get my hands on some early prototypes to see how they work in everyday situations, and decide whether those lofty claims are true - be sure to check back later today to see how I get on.
