Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor might have been a disappointment to many, but the company’s upcoming Snapdragon 820 chipset promises to change everything. Early information on the upcoming processor released by Qualcomm shows that the 820 will be twice as fast and power-efficient over the 810. Needless to say, this is a very promising sign.
This improvement is mainly due to the new Kyro CPU, which is developed by Qualcomm itself. With a base clock speed of 2.2GHz, it is the successor to Krait, the company’s CPU architecture that was last seen implemented in the Snapdragon 805, the predecessor to the 810.
More tech-savvy individuals would know that the Snapdragon 810 utilises off-the-shelf ARM Cortex CPU cores instead of Qualcomm’s own CPU architecture to bring 64-bit computing to high-end devices while Kyro was in development. Needless to say, this brought up various overheating and performance issues.
To ensure that the same time will not happen to the Snapdragon 820 chipset, Qualcomm will build it on a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process; the very same method the Samsung Exynos 7420 processor utilised. On top of that, it will also be equipped with the new Adreno 530 GPU, which is said to be 40% faster and power-efficient than the Adreno 430 used in the 810.
Seeing how Snapdragon 800-series processors before the 810 have been a success, it’s highly likely that the Snapdragon 820 processor will redeem Qualcomm. After all, the upcoming chipset will run on the company’s new Kyro CPU, a custom architecture – unlike the Snapdragon 810. We should start seeing devices powered by the Snapdragon 820 in early 2016.
(Source: Qualcomm via Ars Technica)
