Qualcomm is hoping that the Snapdragon 820 will make us forget about the overheating issues that plagued the Snapdragon 810, and if the details on the new SoC that the company just revealed are true, it might actually do that. We already know about the chip’s Adreno 530 GPU, which Qualcomm claims is 40% faster than the Adreno 430 inside the Snapdragon 810, the company has gone into detail about its custom Kryo CPU cores. Not only does the company claim Kryo will make the Snapdragon 820 twice as powerful as its ARM-based predecessor, it’ll also be twice as energy-efficient. Pair that with the hardware-based malware protection that’s being integrated into the chip, and it’s actually pretty easy to forget about the Snapdragon 810’s overheating issues.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor has been purposefully designed to provide innovative user experiences for premium-tier mobile devices. To deliver the type of innovation consumers expect, mobile processors must be designed to handle increasing computing requirements, while simultaneously using less battery power and remain cooler than ever, with thinner and lighter designs being employed by OEMs. Experiences like virtual reality, computer vision, and advanced imaging are helping expand smartphone capabilities, while also demanding more performance. Balancing increased performance with longer battery life has always been critical for mobile processors—and Snapdragon 820 has been designed with efficiency throughout. The 820 is engineered with custom-built, highly optimized cores designed for heterogeneous computing—the ability to combine different functional cores of the system-on-chip (SoC), like the CPU, GPU and DSP cores, to achieve previously unattainable performance and power savings, rather than using the same core for different tasks. Qualcomm Technologies has been custom designing mobile processors for over twenty-five years, and using our heterogeneous computing experience, we’ve custom designed each of the individual cores of the Snapdragon 820 to achieve higher efficiency so that they work together more effectively as a comprehensive system with other onboard components, hence the term “system-on-chip.”
