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Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 and 808 Processors
- amckenna 13y agoThese chips look pretty cool. That's quite a bit of power in one package. On a side note - for a press release it seemed kind of casual: "And because the only thing sadder than a selfie is a selfie that cannot be shared, remember you can upload these high-res images and HDR videos faster with the Snapdragon processor’s 4th generation 4G LTE solution."
- ldayley 13y agoThe link is for a corporate blog post, not the official presser (which is linked at the bottom). The blog site appears to be aiming towards consumers than the press release, which is as formal as any other tech release. EDIT: Mod has changed URL to Anandtech review from original link
- higherpurpose 13y agoVery disappointed about this generation of processors from Qualcomm. It seems like they were caught off-guard by the introduction of an ARMv8 processor by Apple last year, and soon after they scrambled to release an ARMv8 chip - any ARMv8 chip, so they don't look like they're as behind as they really are. That's how they announced the Cortex A53-based chip as soon as possible early this year (that one was probably already planned, since they use stock ARM CPU's at the mid-range), and now a Cortex A57-based one, even though they licensed the ARMv8 architecture a few years ago, and they were supposed to ship Krait's successor 2 years after its introduction, which would be right about now, and before ARM's own stock designs. What's the point of buying the architecture license, if ARM itself can outcompete you, and forces you to buy their stock CPU designs anyway? The only explanation is that they were trying to milk Krait for at least 3-3.5 years, before they were planning to launch their own ARMv8-based Krait successor. Apple seems to have screwed their plans, and forced them to buy Cortex A57 for the high-end. I'm even less impressed with the GPU. The high-end one by the looks of it will probably score around 200 Gflops, while Nvidia's mobile Kepler is already over 300. And the 4k support and "live HDR" for video? Please, that's old news. Everything about these chips screams "rushed" and "repackaged" (even their names).
- mrpippy 13y agoAnand stated in a previous article that Chinese customers were basically demanding 64-bit 4 or 8-core SoCs, just to tick checkboxes on a spec sheet. Of course it's pretty well established that 2 fast/wide cores (like Apple and Qualcomm's in-house designs) are better for current mobile software than 4 or 8 slower ones. And Android doesn't take any advantage of ARMv8 right now. Another sad example of marketing trumping engineering reality.
- TwoBit 13y agoI think games that use take advantage of high parallelism would do better on the 8 core devices. We just don't see much of that kind of game in the mobile market.
- TylerE 13y agoWe don't see that on the _desktop_ market.
- zanny 13y agoWe also don't see many 8 core chips on the desktop market. Chicken and egg problem. Very few people have the incentive or funds to get either the hyperthreaded i7s (which don't really have 4 cores), the 8 core Xeons or the 8 core AMD high end parts.
- TylerE 13y agoVery few games can even use two threads to full capacity.
- mikeash 13y agoAren't games of all stripes typically GPU bound rather than CPU bound these days, if they're complicated enough to be limited by the hardware at all? If so, dedicating more area to GPU cores would be better for them.
- Spittie 13y agoAnandTech as a nice, more informative article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms-snapdragon-808810-20nm-highend-64bit-socs-with-lte-category-67-support-in-2015 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms-snapdragon-8088...
- dang 13y agoThanks! We changed it.
- leoc 13y agoIf you're going to be changing the linked articles in submissions regularly now, you should change the site to automatically mark comments which were in response to an article which is no longer the linked article.
- dang 13y ago> regularly now We've always made these changes regularly. The only new thing is that we've been commenting about it, hopefully making things a little clearer than before. We're not closed to implementing something to reduce the intelligibility gap you're talking about. But it would have to be very simple, i.e. unobtrusive and fit in with the existing design. If anyone knows a simple way to do it, please email it to hn@ycombinator.com.
- Spittie 13y agoThanks :) For reference, this was the old link: http://www.qualcomm.com/media/blog/2014/04/07/introducing-snapdragon-810-and-808-processors-ultimate-connected-computing http://www.qualcomm.com/media/blog/2014/04/07/introducing-sn...
- iandanforth 13y agoOne thing you may have missed from CES that these chips enable is the ultrasound pen. I think this is freakin cool technology! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwmS126YX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwmS126YX0
- windsurfer 13y agoWhy are these chips required? The video doesn't explain it, and it seems like it's just ultrasonic triangulation.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI am sure I am the only one who thought "Gee, why is Broadcom selling a sonic screwdriver?" :-) That said, I'm curious how they expect this to work, although I expect in typical Broadcom fashion there will be no way to get information on it :-(
- ZoF 13y agoEven bigger news should be the fact that Qualcomm == Broadcom in your estimation :)
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSigh. Its true. I'm guessing they sit in the same set of neurons or something. When I'm reading about modems and RF gear I always read it as Qualcomm but for CPUs I tend transliterate Qualcomm into Broadcom way to frequently.
- higherpurpose 13y agoI like that there are at least 3 different technologies for accurate styluses on Android: there's the active digitizer based pen, like Samsung's S-pen, there's this ultrasonic one from Qualcomm, and Nvidia's chip-based inexpesive solution. Too bad Google itself doesn't seem to be too interested in this area too much, even though it could be a pretty big competitive advantage against Apple's iPad, so we're only seeing random tablets that support them.
- paul_f 13y agoStep back for a minute and realize how astonishing these devices are. As someone who was in the semiconductor industry in the late 80s and 90s I am just blown away. We are putting magic on chips
- sizzle 13y agowhat were some of the cutting edge specs like back then?
- rodgerd 13y agoLike for like? I was programming on Acorn Archimedes 310s back in 1987: an ARM 2 clocked at 8 MHz. The memory and video controllers were discrete chips. Acorn claimed that their ARM 2's pipeline design let it run integer operations at the same speed as a 20 - 25 MHz 386. IIRC it only had 23 instructions, making it the most pure RISC design to be available off the shelf.
- infocollector 13y agoAnyone knows the expected price points of the various versions?
- z3phyr 13y agoI am still waiting for the public release of their NPUs :)
- TD-Linux 13y agoThat's a lot of die area for video decoding! It's substantially larger than their entire set of CPUs. I've got a feeling that full-hardware video decoding is going to die off, having worked on it myself. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to leave so much silicon idle most of the time, when you could just accelerate a more general purpose processor or GPU to have very wide integer paths.