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Qualcomm835

When Qualcomm appear the Snapdragon 835 earlier this year, the general determination was that the new core would feature an improved version of the company's Kryo CPU architecture, with better functioning thanks to fine-tuning of that pattern. It turns out that's not the path Qualcomm is taking.

Kryo: Frozen out

The new Snapdragon 835 uses a CPU core that Qualcomm calls the Kryo 280, but that chip isn't based on its prior Kryo CPU at all. Instead, information technology'south a big.Niggling configuration that Anandtech believes is based on the Cortex-A72 or A73 with 4 efficiency cores and four high-power cores. Qualcomm is the beginning major manufacturer to ship a blueprint that takes advantage of ARM's new licensing model for the Cortex family.

Historically, ARM has offered two CPU licenses: You could take out a license for a standard Cortex CPU design with no opportunity to deviate from ARM's set of specifications for that product, or y'all could license the ARM instruction set and build any kind of flake you wanted. ARM did allow for some flexibility under this model, in terms of number of cores, big.Little configurations, and total on-lath cache, merely customization opportunities were express. The new Congenital On ARM Cortex Technology license allows companies to brand more significant deviations from ARM's base of operations plans without having to build entirely custom chips.

Qualcomm has refused to acknowledge exactly what ARM chip information technology used for the Kryo 280's base design, simply confirmed to Anandtech that the CPU clusters are semi-custom designs and that it built the Snapdragon 835'southward retention controllers.

The above graph is from Anandtech (they've got a significant amount of benchmark data in multiple tests), and it shows a huge leap for the 835 in integer workloads, particularly when compared with the original Kryo. Where Kryo excels, on the other hand, is in floating betoken calculations; the Snapdragon 821 is i.23x faster than its next-closest competitor. Retentivity operations on the 835 are significantly faster than the older Kryo processor, and overall system benchmarks testify pregnant uplift besides.

GPU performance is also mostly stronger, though much of the gain is delivered through a straight frequency increase. Overall testing showed a significant subtract in power consumption as well, with stock-still workload power consumption on a reference SD820 device at 4.6W and SD835 at 3.56W.

In hindsight, I can't help wondering if the Snapdragon 821'south loftier floating-point performance was related to Qualcomm's server ambitions. The visitor'due south Falkor CPU core is said to be derived from its Snapdragon family unit (with some tweaks and changes) and strong floating-point operation would make the scrap more than effective in some HPC workloads. We won't know if this is true until Qualcomm'due south Falkor is available for testing, simply information technology's non implausible — like other ARM vendors, Qualcomm has focused on ramping upwards overall CPU density, and a mobile chip with intrinsically depression power consumption is a good starting point to deliver on such a design.

Either way, the Snapdragon 835 looks similar a solid comeback on the 820 and 821, even if Qualcomm is stepping abroad from its ain cadre designs and towards something more in-line with ARM's stock Cortex architecture.