Today Qualcomm is asserting an replace to its extraordinarily profitable Snapdragon 865 SoC: the brand new Snapdragon 865+. The Snapdragon 865 had already seen super success with over 140 completely different design wins, powering a few of the finest Android smartphone units this 12 months. We’re previous the hectic spring launch cycle of units, and very similar to final 12 months with the S855+, for the summer time and autumn launch cycle, Qualcomm is offering distributors with the choice for a higher-performance binned variant of the chip, the brand new S865+. As a little bit of a arbitrary, but additionally necessary attribute of the brand new chip is that that is the primary ever cellular silicon to lastly cross the 3GHz frequency mark.
| Qualcomm Snapdragon Flagship SoCs 2020 | |||
| SoC | Snapdragon 865 |
Snapdragon 865+
|
|
| CPU | 1x Cortex A77 @ 2.84GHz 1x512KB pL2 3x Cortex A77 4x Cortex A55 4MB sL3 @ ?MHz |
1x Cortex A77 @ 3.1GHz 1x512KB pL2 3x Cortex A77 4x Cortex A55 4MB sL3 @ ?MHz |
|
| GPU | Adreno 650 @ 587 MHz | Adreno 650 @ ? +10% Perf |
|
| DSP / NPU | Hexagon 698
15 TOPS AI |
||
| Memory Controller |
4x 16-bit CH
@ 2133MHz LPDDR4X / 33.4GB/s 3MB system degree cache |
||
| ISP/Camera | Dual 14-bit Spectra 480 ISP
1x 200MP 64MP ZSL or 2x 25MP ZSL 4K video & 64MP burst seize |
||
| Encode/ Decode |
8K30 / 4K120 10-bit H.265
Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, HLG 720p960 infinite recording |
||
| Integrated Modem | none (Paired with exterior X55 solely) (LTE Category 24/22) (5G NR Sub-6 + mmWave) |
||
| Mfc. Process | TSMC 7nm (N7P) |
||
We’ve come to know the Snapdragon 865 fairly nicely over the previous few months, detailing the efficiency of the chipset in our preliminary benchmark articles in addition to a extra intensive deep-dive in our Galaxy S20 overview. The new Snapdragon 865+ is a brand new binned variant of the identical chipset with larger peak frequencies on the a part of the “prime” CPU in addition to the GPU, promising +10% efficiency on each features.
The First Mobile Silicon to Break Past 3GHz – 3.1GHz Even
Whilst in relative phrases the brand new chipset’s +10% clock enchancment isn’t all that earth-shattering, in absolute phrases it lastly permits the brand new Snapdragon 865+ to be the primary cellular SoC to interrupt previous the 3GHz threshold, barely exceeding that mark at a peak 3.1GHz frequency. Ever for the reason that Cortex-A75 technology we’ve seen Arm make claims about their CPU microarchitectures reaching such excessive clock frequencies – nonetheless in all these years precise silicon merchandise by distributors by no means actually managed to fairly get that shut in industrial mass-production designs.
We’ve had a chat with Qualcomm’s SVP and GM of cellular enterprise Alex Katouzian, about how Qualcomm achieved this, and basically it’s a mixture of aggressive bodily design of the product in addition to enhancing manufacturing yields throughout the product’s lifecycle. Katouzian defined that they’d have been capable of obtain these frequencies on the vanilla Snapdragon 865 – however they’d have had a decrease amount of merchandise with the ability to meet this mark as a consequence of manufacturing variations. Yield enhancements throughout the lifecycle of the Snapdragon 865 signifies that the corporate is ready to supply this larger frequency variant now.
For context, within the cellular world, normally SoC SKUs are binned not by efficiency (clock-frequency), however by energy (voltage variations). This is available in distinction to the desktop and server world the place one single silicon design is binned by completely different efficiency SKUs, various in…
