Qualcomm Announces Next-Gen Snapdragon 808 and 810 SoCs 47
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Qualcomm has announced two fundamentally new chips today with updated CPU cores as well as Qualcomm's new Adreno 400-class GPU. The Snapdragon 808 and the Snapdragon 810 have been unveiled with a host of new architectural enhancements. The Snapdragon 810 will be the highest-end solution, with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 paired alongside four low-power Cortex-A53 cores.
The Snapdragon 808 will also use a big.Little design, but the core layouts will be asymmetric — two Cortex-A57's paired with four Cortex-A53's. The Cortex-A57 is, by all accounts, an extremely capable processor — which means a pair of them in a dual-core configuration should be more than capable of driving a high-end smartphone. Both SoC's will use a 20nm radio and a 28nm RF transceiver. That's a major step forward for Qualcomm (most RF today is built on 40nm). RF circuits typically lag behind digital logic by at least one process node. Given that RF currently accounts for some 15% of the total area and 30-40% of the PCB, the benefits of moving to a smaller manufacturing process for the RF circuit are significant." To clarify, the 810 can use a combination of the Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores so a single task that needs a lot of power won't cause as large of a power jump. All of the chips are 64-bit ARM too.
The Snapdragon 808 will also use a big.Little design, but the core layouts will be asymmetric — two Cortex-A57's paired with four Cortex-A53's. The Cortex-A57 is, by all accounts, an extremely capable processor — which means a pair of them in a dual-core configuration should be more than capable of driving a high-end smartphone. Both SoC's will use a 20nm radio and a 28nm RF transceiver. That's a major step forward for Qualcomm (most RF today is built on 40nm). RF circuits typically lag behind digital logic by at least one process node. Given that RF currently accounts for some 15% of the total area and 30-40% of the PCB, the benefits of moving to a smaller manufacturing process for the RF circuit are significant." To clarify, the 810 can use a combination of the Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores so a single task that needs a lot of power won't cause as large of a power jump. All of the chips are 64-bit ARM too.
"There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that" (Score:5, Informative)
"I know there's a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7. I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that," -Anand Chandrasekher, former Qualcomm CMO
Re:SVLTE/SVDO? (Score:4, Informative)
So does this finally mean we'll get Simultaneous voice and LTE/SVDO back?
64-bit ARM and support for simultaneous voice and LTE/SVDO are completely different things.
The 64-bit ARM cores are application processors (AP). They do not control the modem (that can be part of the SoC together with the AP or an external component): Qualcomm modems have nifty internally developed (and publicly documented) a VLIW CPU called "Hexagon" that offers DSP-like instructions to control the modem. Some modems have two, and another Hexagon is used to process audio and cal also run user provided applications. You can find some information here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q... [wikipedia.org] and a lot more is linked.
And even this has nothing to do with dual radios. They are independent things.
Roberto
Re:"There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that (Score:4, Informative)
Now that one person is doing it, everyone is going to have to do it. It's going to be difficult selling a 32-bit processor when the guy across the street is selling a 64-bit one.
There's a lot more reason to go 64 bit than that. The biggest is that it's not going to be long before smartphones and tablets have > 3 GiB RAM. Yeah, there are all sorts of workarounds you can use to access larger amounts of RAM with 32-bit pointers, but it's much nicer to have a flat address space, including plenty of address space for memory-mapped devices. Granted that we're probably a couple of years away from needing 64 bits, but it's coming, fast.
32-bit ARM already addresses more than 32 bits: recent 32 bit ARM architectures have a 48 bit address space, and several chips support 36 or 40 bits. The problem of individual applications addressing at most 32 bits is minor, at this stage, but sooner or later we will have big graphics editing applications on Tablets, and larger address spaces help.
The main advantage that Aarch64 has at this very moment is that it offers a more streamlined instruction set (that makes instructions easier to reorder) and more registers. Even just compiling 32 bit code in the new model you can get impressive performance gains.
Roberto
Re:"There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that (Score:3, Informative)
32-bit ARM already addresses more than 32 bits: recent 32 bit ARM architectures have a 48 bit address space, and several chips support 36 or 40 bits. The problem of individual applications addressing at most 32 bits is minor, at this stage, but sooner or later we will have big graphics editing applications on Tablets, and larger address spaces help.
It can, but it's not really fun that way. Realistically, using high memory (that is not within the directly mapped part accessible to the kernel) eventually causes headaches. The default configuration on arm32 (and x86-32, for that matter) is to have only 768MB of lowmem, if you go beyond that you get into trouble because a lot of the kernel's data structures (page tables, inodes, socket buffers, ...) have to be in lowmem. You can push that limit to 2 or 3 GB at the expense of limiting user address space, but the higher you go, the sillier it gets. If you have 4GB or more on any architecture, you definitely want a 64 bit CPU.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2, Informative)
The idea of the "little" part of BIG.little is that a device can be much more power efficient. While the big cores (Cortex-A57) can do the heavy processing power, for lower CPU requirements the little cores (Cortex-A53) will suffice and the big cores will be off to save power.
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/biglittleprocessing.php (It's helpful, but a bit like an advertisement)