The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Performance Preview
by Matt Humrick & Ryan Smith on March 22, 2017 4:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- SoCs
- Snapdragon 835
- Kryo
The Snapdragon 820 SoC was a significant milestone on Qualcomm’s roadmap. It was a solid improvement over the 808/810, delivering higher performance and efficiency, and became a commercial success, finding its way into the majority of flagship phones last year. More importantly, it heralded Qualcomm’s vision for mobile devices: heterogeneous computing. This meant new hardware—a much improved Hexagon 680 DSP that added single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) Hexagon Vector Extensions (HVX); Qualcomm’s first fully-custom 64-bit CPU core, Kryo, which focused on improving floating-point IPC; and an updated Adreno GPU with strong ALU performance—for enabling new software technologies and user experiences—artificial intelligence for smarter personal assistants, machine learning for object recognition, computational photography for better image and video quality, and new AR/VR experiences.
Snapdragon 835—now a part of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Mobile Platform that includes all of the company’s mobile hardware and software—is an evolutionary product that builds on this vision. The greater than 3 billion transistor SoC is the first to use Samsung’s 10nm "10LPE" FinFET process, which reduces overall package size by 35% relative to Snapdragon 820. The new SoC’s CPU transplant and X16 LTE modem, which tops out at 1Gbps (Category 16) on the downlink, are the biggest changes, but most of the other blocks within the SoC have received at least minor updates too. For detailed information about all the changes and new features, you can read our Snapdragon 835 launch article.
| Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs: Three Generations | |||
| SoC | Snapdragon 835 (MSM8998) |
Snapdragon 820 / 821 (MSM8996 / MSM8996 Pro) |
Snapdragon 810 (MSM8994) |
| CPU | 4x Kryo 280 Performance @ 2.45GHz 4x Kryo 280 Efficiency @ 1.90GHz |
2x Kryo @ 2.15GHz / 2.34GHz 2x Kryo @ 1.59GHz / 2.19GHz |
4x Cortex-A57 @ 2.00GHz 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.50GHz |
| GPU | Adreno 540 @ 710MHz ? | Adreno 530 @ 624MHz / 653MHz | Adreno 430 @ 630MHz |
| Memory | 2x 32-bit @ 1866MHz LPDDR4x 29.9GB/s |
2x 32-bit @ 1866MHz LPDDR4 29.9GB/s |
2x 32-bit @ 1600MHz LPDDR4 25.6GB/s |
| ISP/Camera | Dual 14-bit Spectra 180 ISP 1x 32MP or 2x 16MP |
Dual 14-bit Spectra ISP 1x 25MP or 2x 13MP |
Dual 14-bit ISP 1x 21MP |
| Encode/Decode | 2160p30 (2160p60 decode), 1080p120 H.264 & H.265 |
2160p30 (2160p60 decode), 1080p120 H.264 & H.265 |
2160p30 (2160p60 decode), 1080p120 H.264 & H.265 |
| Integrated Modem | Snapdragon X16 LTE (Category 16/13) DL = 1000Mbps 3x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 150Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM |
Snapdragon X12 LTE (Category 12/13) DL = 600Mbps 3x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 150Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM |
Snapdragon X10 LTE (Category 9) DL = 450Mbps 3x20MHz CA, 64-QAM UL = 50Mbps 1x20MHz CA, 16-QAM |
| Mfc. Process | 10nm LPE | 14nm LPP | 20nm SoC |
In what has become an annual tradition going all the way back to Snapdragon 800, Qualcomm invited the media to its headquarters in San Diego for some feature demonstrations and limited testing using the company's Mobile Development Platform (MDP) devices. These are fully functional tablets or smartphones in a slightly oversized, utilitarian chassis used for hardware testing and software development. The MDP for Snapdragon 810 took the form of a tablet, while Snapdragon 820 came inside a large smartphone with a 6.2-inch display. This downsizing trend continues for Snapdragon 835, whose MDP/S is a smartphone with 6GB of RAM, a 5.5-inch 2560x1440 display, and a small 2850 mAh battery. The use of a smaller chassis is encouraging, because it has less mass and surface area to absorb and dissipate heat. This suggests a lower TDP for the 835, but we'll need to measure power consumption to be sure.
Because we only had a limited time for testing, we focused on running some basic CPU, GPU, and memory performance tests. Keep in mind that we were testing prototype hardware running pre-production software that resulted in a few hiccups. The condensed testing period also forced us to stray slightly from our usual testing methodology. Therefore, these numbers should be viewed as preliminary and could change by the time retail units begin shipping.
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yankeeDDL - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
In most of the graphs where the iPhone is present, they trounce anything else. It is quite disappointing, being an Android enthusiast, to see that the 835 does not catch up with a 6 month old phone...shing3232 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
but the bright side is that huge reduction in Power usage compare to 820ddriver - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
This is comparing apples to oranges. Unless the two CPUs run the same code, performance is irrelevant.The web is majorly a shitpile of bloat, ridden with inefficiency. Apple simply invested more time into optimizing their web / JS implementation. This is not really indicative of CPU performance, only of web implementation optimizations.
And while it is true that apple's single threaded performance has been better, that is only a part of the story. You have the budget of n amount of transistors to put into x amount of total performance. If you have more threads, then obviously individual threads will be slower. Optimizing for low count threads is actually a pretty good idea given the typical mobile device usage patterns.
Why do most ARM chipmakers push for higher core count is a mystery to me. That is a STUPID strategy. It makes it that much harder to squeeze the most of your hardware.
I've been running proprietary software on phones and tables since 2012, software designed to scale adequately, and as a result, I see better overall performance from flagship android devices despite apple's better ST performance, but only because of the kind of workloads I am running. So while the chips aren't anywhere nearly as slow as AT's lame benchmarking suite would suggest, it is not exactly straightforward to get the max of their performance.
Lastly, the is this thing called "fast enough". Even if apple chips are traditionally faster in typical mobile applications than those found in android devices, this is not really an issue if the slower devices are still fast enough. I haven't really seen bottlenecks in the few 3rd party android apps I am using, so even with software that has not been designed to make use of many cores, things still run fast enough to not present an issue in regards with user experience.
All in all, in general I'd say ARM is not really trying to make things good, at least not as far as the user is concerned. The only reason apple invest into tangibly improving on the stock ARM designs is for the hype factor, rather than actually putting that performance into productivity. Mobile platforms are doubly limited just to make sure they don't revolutionize computing, both in terms of hardware, and available software. Pretty much next to useless toys, intended to use you far more than you use them, unless you have the resources to put into developing proprietary software tailored to your productivity needs.
close - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Apple has yet another advantage. Since it controls its ecosystem end to end it can optimize the software for their specific hardware. In the Android ecosystem you have configurations ranging from 1 to 10 cores (or more?), so many different generations, so many different custom and semi-custom cores. A little trickier to optimize. So Android OEMs go for the numbers. Core numbers that is. Now with 25% more cores.And lets not forget another aspect. Historically Apple focused on optimizing the SoC layout for performance which led to much bigger cores which doesn't seem to be the method of choice in the Android ecosystem. They worked on improving the density, especially with the A8 and the A10.
ericgl21 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Yep...iPhone's A10 Fusion chip is very capable indeed. And in September they're probably going to announce a better one (maybe called "A11"). Looks like Apple is ahead of everyone else, especially when it comes to web-related speeds.Samip - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Did you not read the disclaimer right below the web benchmarks?joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Guess what? I have never seen any comparison between iPhone 7 and flagship Android phone with SD821 where iPhone 7 is faster in app and browsing site. These benchmarks mean nothing if you are using different platforms particularly OS.Check out this comparison
https://youtu.be/mcTAXsFHu5I
gigathlete - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Check out this comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm8zC2VAr8wjoms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Bwaha PhoneBluff. Who launches 10 apps in a minute and close it right away with the home button? Retards?His finger is faster on the home button of iPhone than OP3T =D
TadzioPazur - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
This "test" is broken. Instead of measuring each activity individually, the test mashes them all together and measures total time. This makes no sense whatsoever - users are interested in doing one thing at a time, so individual tests somehow reflect perceived speed of the device.Measuring all together is not how we use these kind of devices. Especially that a lot of those activities reflect the mass storage sequential read. So all PhoneBuff needed to have done to show his beloved device was the fastest, was to put enough application load activities and leverage faster IO.
So I do think this "test" is so much worse than the above, posted by @joms_us.