Published in Mobiles

Qualcomm SVP talks Snapdragon 820 and 821

by on17 October 2016


4G 5G summit: What is important for the future

Keith Kressin, senior VP of product management at Qualcomm, has just given us a quick overview on the state of Snapdragon 820 and 821, and has discussed what will be important for the future of Snapdragon.

Keith said that Snapdragon 820 and 821 combined have more than 150 design wins, and that almost every OEM which makes high-end phones is using one of them. Snapdragon 820 introduced new custom Kryo cores and has shown that four cores can give competitors a run for their money.

Kryo cores, as well as the Adreno 530 GPU, use  compression algorithms that can save as much as 40 percent of bandwidth, a crucial issue of any complex mobile SoCs such as Snapdragon. This of course will depend on the given scenario.

Snapdragon also comes with the Snapdragon X12 model, capable of 600 Mbps uploads and 150 Mbps downloads and is considered the best in its class. There is also a standalone Snapdragon X16 capable of 1Gbps speeds, an industry first and currently the fastest, for now.

Keith also reminded us that Snapdragon 821 and 820 come with Hexagon DSP 680 that helps in delivering low power, low latency for specific tasks. The Spectra ISP is also an important part of the SoC as they are tailor-made to produce better pictures than the competition.

Machine learning and machine intelligence, as well as context-aware computing, will be an important part of the future of Snapdragon development. Ultra HD VoLTE, audio quality, AR and VR performance are some areas of importance for the future of Snapdragon.

Of course security and biometrics are also some key areas of interest as well as lowering battery consumption, and obtaining better image quality including 360-degree camera performance, 3D and low light photography.

Qualcomm addressed all these experiences with the Snapdragon 820 and 821 and it will continue to investigate and improve these aspects with the future product.

Keith also mentioned that what you see today with the high-end Snapdragon 800 series will essentially come down to the other versions of Snapdragon, including 600 or 400 series in the future.

Qualcomm is not ready to talk about the chip that we call Snapdragon 830, 10nm, but given its history of announcements, 4G and 5G summits are mainly focused on connectivity, and the dedicated Snapdragon event usually happens separately.

Last modified on 17 October 2016
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