The Snapdragon 845 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2018
by Ryan Smith & Andrei Frumusanu on February 12, 2018 12:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- SoCs
- Snapdragon 845
First Thoughts
Coming into 2018, Qualcomm is facing what we expect to be a busy and certainly competitive year for the company in the smartphone platform space. Iterating on the well-received Snapdragon 835 – and without the benefit of a new manufacturing node – is no easy task. All the while Apple has once again thrown down the gauntlet with their A11 SoC if one wants to argue about top tech, and even in the Android space Qualcomm isn’t the only high-end SoC vendor, as we await to see what Samsung’s Exynos 9810 and its new Exynos M3 CPU cores can achieve.
Still, it’s a challenge that Qualcomm should be prepared for, if not a bit unevenly. With a focus on architecture the company has been hard at work for the Snapdragon 845, and as a result while it’s very much a Qualcomm SoC, it’s also not just a rehash of Snapdragon 835. Both the CPU and GPU are seeing substantial overhauls, not to mention smaller upgrades across the board for everything from the modem to the audio codec. And while Qualcomm rightfully argues that there’s more to a platform than just raw compute performance – that all of these pieces contribute to the overall user experience – they remain vital to device performance and battery life. Which is to say that Qualcomm is innovating where they need to in order to continue improving the heart of many flagship 2018 Android smartphones.
Overall the Snapdragon 845’s system performance is a mixed bag. We had higher expectations from the new CPU changes, but it seems we’ve only gotten incremental improvements. Web workloads seem to be the Snapdragon 845’s forte as that’s where we see the largest improvements. ARM is working on a long awaited overhaul as the Austin team is busy with a brand new microarchitecture which should bring larger generational improvements, but alas only with the next generation of SoCs in 2019. For many flagship Android phones, 2018 should remain another conservative year and we should not have too high expectations.
But with that said, whatever Qualcomm doesn’t quite bring to the table with their CPU, they more than make up on the GPU side of matters. Qualcomm’s new Adreno 630 GPU easily impresses and widens the gap to the nearest competition. Compared to the Exynos 8895 and Kirin 970 I expect the Snapdragon 845 to have a 3.5-5x PPA advantage when it comes to the GPU. The competition should be worried as it’s no longer feasible to compensate the power efficiency disadvantage with larger GPU configurations and there is need for more radical change to keep up with Qualcomm.
And while we weren’t able to test for system power efficiency improvements for this preview, we weren’t left empty-handed and were able to quickly do a CPU power virus on the QRD845. The results there have turned out promising, with 1W per-core and slightly under 4W for four-core power usage, which are very much in line with the Snapdragon 835. The new system cache and GPU improvements should also noticeably improve SoC – and in turn device – efficiency, so I’m expecting that 2018’s Snapdragon 845 powered devices to showcase excellent battery life.
What remains to be seen then is how this translates into shipping products. Previous Qualcomm device previews have turned out to be rather accurate, but handset manufacturers have countless ways to customize their phones, both for good and for bad. What we can say for now is that it looks like Qualcomm has once again delivered its handset partners a solid SoC from which to build their flagship phones. So we’re eager to see what retail phones can deliver, and ultimately how the Snapdragon 845 fits into the overall market for 2018 Android flagship smartphones.
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Tigran - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Any ideas why S821 overperforms both S845 and S835 in Geekbench 4 Floating Point Performance Single Threaded?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
The original Kryo had very robust FP execution pipelines while having weaker integer and memory subsystems. Please keep in mind those are normalized per clock, not absolute performance.Tigran - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Does it mean the new Kryo in S835 & S845 compromises FP performance to obtain better performance in integer calculations (per clock)?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
The new Kryo's have nothing to do with the microarchitecture of the original S820 Kryo as the former are ARM designs while the latter was a full Qualcomm design - you can't say compromise as it's not a deliberate choice but that's just the differences between the CPUs.jjj - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
And efficiency is not factored in, Kryo was not great at that.gregounech - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
First word of System performance page should be "Now we see how" and not "How we see how" :)Otherwise great job Andrei & Ryan!
tuxRoller - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
From fd.o:"The a6xx GPU is an iteration of the a5xx family so most of the GPU side code
looks pretty close to the same except for the usual register differences. The
big different is in power control. On the a5xx there was a rudimentary device
called the GMU that did some basic power stuff but left most of the complexity
to the kernel. On the a6xx the power complexity is being moved to a component
called the GMU (graphics management unit)."
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2...
GC2:CS - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Seems like qualc is at their pre 810 days again. It’s definitely going to be a standrad of android soc this year.Regarding the entire mobile landscape, I think Qualcomm dropped the ball with legacy ARM designs, and everyone got somewhat lazy with their own design and IPC. And it looks kind of poor now that Apple is now on their sixth gen of custom, each bringing a significant improvement.
GPU got more impresion. Obviously they’ve done a lot of work over the years. It is going to be interesting if they can claim the crown from Apple this year for that. On the other hand Apple got a bit lazy with the GPU too - with A9 and A10 being excessively power hungry because they reused the same core clocking it higher.
It’s super impressive they managed to match A11 at peak, but they should not slow down as that is Apple’s first GPU and the efficiency they pulled over A10 is just insane - this year is gonna be exciting.
But OEM’s migt want to bring up somewhat more than just make device upgrades rely on some%qeuieckerer moniker.
generalako - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Andrei Frumusanu has completely lost his legitimacy as a writer on Anandtech. In this post here, he makes the ridiculious claim that Snapdragon 845 should offer "expected performance improvement to 39-52%", despite the fact that Qualcomm themselves very clearly state "up to 25% improvement" on their launch and on their own site: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12114/qualcomm-anno...Now, 2 months later, he merely repeats what Qualcomm said all along, based on the results he got from the device: an overall 20-25% performance improvement.
StormyParis - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
On the article you read, Qualcomm's lists performance at iso-process and frequency (34% for Geekbuying, 48% for Octane), to which you then add the performance gain due to the frequency. That makes Andrew's figures cogent, and your comment idiotic.