Qualcomm makes the snapdragon 820 official

Qualcomm has officially announced its new Snapdragon 820 mobile processor that arrives to forget about the overheating problems of the Snapdragon 810 and to become the new king thanks to a strongly renovated architecture.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 has been highly anticipated after the significant overheating problems of its predecessor the Snapdragon 810. The new Snapdragon 820 arrives manufactured by Samsung with 14nm FinFET lithography and its main novelty is Qualcomm's return to a quad-core design with a strongly customized exclusive architecture.

Quality before quantity

---

With the arrival of 64 bits Qualcomm abandoned its Krait architecture in favor of the traditional big.LITTLE architecture consisting of four Cortex A53 cores + four Cortex A57 cores, something that has not fared as well as with the old Krait. The Snapdragon 820 abandons the big.LITTLE configuration to bet again on a 64-bit quad-core design based on the new Kryo architecture designed by Qualcomm itself and with a maximum frequency of 2.2 GHz.

With this Qualcomm recovers its essence of "quality before quantity" offering fewer cores than its rivals but greatly improved to offer excellent performance and great energy efficiency, much in the style of Apple and its processors. The outcome of such a change remains to be seen but with Qualcomm's record there is no reason not to be optimistic.

A GPU to dominate them all

---

Along with the new Kryo architecture, the Snapdragon 820 includes the new Adreno 530 GPU that promises 40% more efficiency and performance than the Adreno 430 found in the Snapdragon 810. But not everything is pure performance, the Adreno 530 is also characterized by include support for 64-bit virtual addressing, OpenCL 2.0, and heterogeneous computing features.

Pampering the details

---

Added to all of the above is the Hexagon 680 DSP that improves the energy efficiency of the processor and that together with the ISP Spectra will improve the quality of photos taken in low light conditions, the X12 LTE modem that offers 4G LTE Cat. 12 connectivity with a download speed of 600 Mbps and upload of 150 Mbps, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, support for 4K displays and 28-megapixel cameras, support for UFS 2.0 and eMMC 5.1 Flash memory, USB 3.0, support for LPDDR4 RAM at 1866 MHz and Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 technology that is 38% faster than its predecessor.

More information: qualcomm