Qualcomm Snapdragon 820: 5 Things We Like About It

There are reports that the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset will be much better compared to its predecessor. Previously, the Snapdragon was plagued with complaints because of its overheating issues.

The Snapdragon 810 was released in 2015, but had thermal problems that hindered its true potential and even caused Samsung to opt for its own Exynos processor to power the Samsung Galaxy S6. Since August 2015, there have been claims that the Snapdragon 820 will be a huge improvement.

Droid-Life reported that the company finally unveiled the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chip on Nov. 10, 2015 at a launch event in New York. The new chipset features new Kryo cores that are closely integrated with the X10 LTE modem and the Adrena 418 GPU. Tim McDonough, CEO of Qualcomm, announced that the new processor is thermally efficient and provides more battery life.

Furthermore, McDonough and Derek Aberle, president of Qualcomm, stated that the Snapdragon 820 is made to allow immersive VR and augmented reality experiences, which will render 4K displays up close with surround sound. The technology also provides quick responses to sensor input. Virtual reality will reset the requirements. The company wanted the visual quality to be excellent enough so that people are actually led believe that it is real, PC Mag revealed.

Qualcomm did not show any real VR experiences at the launch event, with the best demos shown at 720p at most. High-quality actually requires the chip, audio, OS and display components. The whole setup is very sophisticated to prepare into a demo device, according to Keith Kresin, VP of corporate development at Qualcomm.

Despite the growing popularity of octa-core chipsets, the Snapdragon 820 only has four cores – two higher-power and two lower-power. Travis Lanier, Qualcomm’s senior director for product management, said that there is very little evidence showing that an OS can benefit from more than two or three cores. There may still be a lot of opportunities left to maximize single-thread performance. Using the new Kryo core will lead to faster performance on single-thread tasks, compared to the Snapdragon 810. The 820 further wraps the CPU in a heterogeneous computing bundle that depends on the DSP and GPU chips for various actions, putting more emphasis on overall chip performance over individual CPU performance.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 is set to launch in devices in the first half of 2016. There are rumors that the chipset will debut in an LG phone or in devices to be introduced at Mobile World Congress in February.