Qualcomm Details Snapdragon 835 Processor (pcmag.com) 42
Qualcomm has detailed the Snapdragon 835 processor, which will power most of the leading Android smartphones this year. It's designed to grab information from the air at gigabit speeds and turn it into rich virtual and augmented reality experiences, according to several executives at a pre-CES briefing. Qualcomm SVP Keith Kressin said, "The 835 is going to be one of the key devices that propels the VR use case." PC Magazine reports: The hardest thing to understand about the Snapdragon 835, especially if you're thinking from a desktop CPU space, is how much Qualcomm has been prioritizing elements of the system-on-chip other than the CPU. This has been coming for years, and it can be tricky because it relies on firmware and the Android OS to properly distribute work to non-CPU components of the chip. During the briefing, it was striking how little Qualcomm talked about its Kryo 280 CPU, as compared to other components. Qualcomm tries to counter that by pointing out that this is the first 10nm mobile processor, which will improve efficiency, and also by saying the CPU is "tightly integrated" with other components using the new Symphony system manager, which operates automatically yet can be customized by application developers. This distributes work across the CPU, GPU, DSP, and more exotic components, letting the Snapdragon 835 work better than it would with CPU alone. How that will combine with Qualcomm's recent announcement that it will support Windows 10 on mobile PCs, including legacy Win32 apps, is yet to be seen. The Snapdragon 835 consumes 25 percent less power than the 820, according to Qualcomm. That means seven hours of 4K streaming video and two hours of VR gaming on a typical device, the company said. These new uses are really power hungry. Since Qualcomm can only do so much on power efficiency, it's also introducing Quick Charge 4, which supposedly charges a phone to five hours of use in five minutes and is USB-C power delivery compliant. The new Adreno 540 graphics chip improves 3D performance by 25 percent over the previous generation, Qualcomm said. But it also enables features like HDR10, which improves colors; foveated rendering, which most clearly renders what you're looking at rather than elements in the periphery of a scene; and low latency, which allows you to move your head smoothly around VR scenes. With one 32MP or two 16MP cameras running at the same time, the Snapdragon 835 supports various dual-camera functions. The Snapdragon 835 will feature the X16 modem, which Qualcomm announced earlier this year and will be able to boost LTE to gigabit speeds. The keys to gigabit LTE are triple 20MHz carrier aggregation with 256-QAM encoding and 4x4 MIMO antennas, said Qualcomm's senior director of marketing, Peter Carson. That's going to be first introduced with a Netgear hotspot in Australia this January, but Sprint and T-Mobile have said they're trying to assemble this set of technologies.
Pi (Score:2, Funny)
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I think you've confused Qualcomm with Broadcom
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So out of nowhere you wanted to let everybody know that you're waiting for something that has neither been announced or exists? Riiiight.
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senior director of marketing (Score:1)
I always want my tech specs from marketing execs because that way I know the info is trustworthy.
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Subject cuz it's required (Score:5, Insightful)
Dang I'm getting sick of marketing speak:
"Qualcomm has detailed the Snapdragon 835 processor, which will power most of the leading Android smartphones this year. It's designed to grab information from the air at gigabit speeds and turn it into rich virtual and augmented reality experiences, ".
It's a processor. I certainly welcome advancement but it's a piece of silicon that does math problems. This one does them a little faster than the last one on a little less power. It ain't magic.
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it's a piece of silicon that does math problems
Really, it's just an expensive clock.
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True, but it's a bigger clock than last year's. People always want the biggest clock.
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Dang I'm getting sick of marketing speak:
"... It's designed to grab information from the air at gigabit speeds and turn it into rich virtual and augmented reality experiences, ".
Wait, wait, you mean this CPU doesn't actually have a built-in robot arm that extends an antenna?! Next you're going to tell me that it can't even convert radio waves into an experience.
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Dang I'm getting sick of marketing speak:
"Qualcomm has detailed the Snapdragon 835 processor, which will power most of the leading Android smartphones this year. It's designed to grab information from the air at gigabit speeds and turn it into rich virtual and augmented reality experiences, ".
It's a processor. I certainly welcome advancement but it's a piece of silicon that does math problems. This one does them a little faster than the last one on a little less power. It ain't magic.
You should have kept reading.
As the rest of the summary details, most of what's new about this SoC is related to boosting LTE speeds and improving graphics performance, not general computation. The marketingspeak is actually more informative than your abbreviated summary.
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I'm very disappointed now...
All well and good (Score:1)
Before marking this troll, look at that 7 hour charge in 5 minutes claim.
Re:All well and good (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice try, but your ability to decode marketing shit is weak.
First, the summary actually says enough charge for 5 hours use in 5 minutes, not 7 hours. Second, they talked about multimedia in sentences placed next to the one about charging, but they didn't actually say they were connected, so they're not. 5 hours of some type of use. What is the most common use for a smart phone? Idling and waiting for a call. So 5 hours of idle time in 5 minutes. But also they're talking about a CPU, not a complete device, so they probably mean that 5 minutes of charge would give you enough power for the CPU's part of that 5 hours of use. Then it doesn't even need to be idle for the numbers to work.
Existing devices often can charge at 5V 2A. That's 0.8 watt hours. If the CPU runs at 1.8V, then that could give you over 50 mA continuous draw for 5 hours. Very reasonable; the much weaker microcontrollers I use in my products use much less than that. 50mA is about what I would expect for the CPU even if it is doing a lot of work; idling it might reasonably be much less than 1mA.
Very reasonable, if you have fluent understanding of Horseshit. If you only speak English, of course, then it makes less sense than Greek would because at least Greek has the decency to use a different set of words than English. ;)
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But also they're talking about a CPU
No, this is about a SoC.
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LOL *woosh*
Same thing man. Clue up. I design circuits with this shit, I know what the difference is, and in this context, it is not different.
An SoC is a CPU that has flash memory and some application-specific built-in code that is generally accessed through an API that disguises itself as a CPU register. But actually, all the CPUs have flash memory, it just isn't always accessible to the user. There is no actual difference in what technology is being used, or how it consumes power.
The even funnier part is,
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If you design circuits with this knowledge, you must be terrible at your job.
A System-On-Chip is just that. Its the whole system. In this case, on the same piece of silicon is a CPU, a GPU, a DSP, a LTE modem, bluetooth, USB, audio, caches, a GPS receiver, Wireless LAN, and more. There's no CPU talking to different chips, they're all the same chip, thus making the "de-emphasis on the CPU" part make sense.
You don't have to believe me. They have a really dumbed down picture that shows the various components o
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An SoC may or may not have each of the technologies you're worried about being able to include, and you learn what capabilities an IC has by reading its datasheet, not by worrying about if it the product listing had an SoC tag. It is not a meaningful term, it is a general term that improves rough sorting of a list of items but is not sufficient to tell anything about the product.
Stop imagining what I might not know, you'll get farther by trying to know things yourself. This is basic shit, how can you possib
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Nice try, but your ability to decode marketing shit is weak.
First, the summary actually says enough charge for 5 hours use in 5 minutes, not 7 hours.
Address that, not your non sequitur idle current jeremiad.
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I did address that. You know it, too, because I quoted it. But why would you want me to increase my focus on your typo? It was rather harmless IMO.
Also, that isn't what jeremiad means. It has to be sad or mournful for that, like a never-ending eulogy. My post was dismissive and flippant where not serious and technical, it wasn't at all mournful.
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WOW (Score:1)
Explosive VR (Score:2)
I'd like a hot running phone that I have to plug in to keep charged right at my eyeballs and in an enclosure. No thanks. I'll stick to real VR on PC. I rather not increase the risk of a battery going thermo on me.
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Maybe thermal feedback is the next big thing after tactile feedback. They just have to synch the explosions on-screen to the explosion of the phone.
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