Qualcomm's Snapdragon 805: 2.5GHz, 128-bit Memory Interface, D3D11-class Graphics & More
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 22, 2013 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Tablets
- Snapdragon 800
- Snapdragon 805
Qualcomm has had an incredible year. It wasn’t too long ago that I was complaining about Qualcomm’s release cadence, the lull between Scorpion and Krait allowed competitors like NVIDIA, Samsung and TI to get a foothold in the market. Since the arrival of Krait, the move to 28nm and the launch of monolithic AP/LTE solutions, no competitor has been able to come close to touching Qualcomm. These days the choice of integrating mobile silicon really boils down to what Snapdragon variant an OEM wants to go with. TI is out of the business, NVIDIA hasn’t seen much traction with Tegra 4 and even Samsung will ship Qualcomm silicon in many of its important markets.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 was the SoC of choice at the beginning of the year, with Snapdragon 800 taking over that title more recently. Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced the successor to the 800: the Snapdragon 805.
We’re expecting to see devices based on the Snapdragon 805 to be shipping in the first half of 2014, so Snapdragon 800 will still enjoy some time at the top of the charts.
The 805 starts by integrating four Krait 450 cores. Krait 450 appears to be an evolutionary upgrade over Krait 400, with no changes to machine width, cache sizes or pipeline depth. Qualcomm claims to have improved power and thermal efficiency, as well as increased maximum frequency from 2.3GHz to 2.5GHz. I suspect the design is quite similar to Krait 400, perhaps with some bug fixes and other minor tweaks. Qualcomm is likely leveraging yield and 28nm HPM process tech improvements to get the extra 200MHz over Krait 400. Krait 450 also adds 36-bit LPAE (Large Physical Address Extensions) to enable memory support above 4GB. This is a similar path to what we saw desktop PCs take years ago, although I'd expect the transition to 64-bit ARMv8 to happen for Qualcomm next year.
The GPU sees the bigger upgrade this round. The Snapdragon 805 features Qualcomm’s Adreno 420, designed 100% in house at Qualcomm. Adreno 420 brings about a D3D11-class feature set to Qualcomm’s mobile graphics, adding support for hull, domain and geometry shaders. Adreno 420 also includes dedicated tessellation hardware. Full profile OpenCL 1.2 is now supported. Texture performance improves by over 2x per pipe, and also gains ASTC support.
Adreno 420 is more efficient at moving data around internally. The GPU has a new dedicated connection to the memory controller, whereas in previous designs the GPU shared a bus with the video decoder and ISP.
Qualcomm insists on occluding things like shader unit counts, so all we have to report today are a 40% increase in shader bound benchmarks (implying a 40% increase in shader hardware and/or more efficient hardware).
Snapdragon 805 also features hardware accelerated decode of H.265 content. Hardware encode is still limited to H.264, but this is an awesome first for Qualcomm.
The Snapdragon 805 brings a much improved ISP. Qualcomm claims more than a 50% increase in ISP throughput (1GPixel/s class) compared to 640MP/s for Snapdragon 800. The 805 leverages its Hexagon DSP to deliver this level of performance. Qualcomm lists no change in DSP architecture between the 805 and 800.
Lastly, we see Qualcomm move to a 128-bit wide LPDDR3 memory interface for Snapdragon 805. With support for LPDDR3-1600, the Snapdragon 805 features up to 25.6GB/s of peak memory bandwidth. It’s interesting to see Qualcomm go this wide just as Apple moved back down to a 64-bit wide interface. Qualcomm and Intel will be the only two shipping such a wide memory interface in the ultra mobile space come next year (although I do expect Apple to return to a wider memory bus at some point).
All of this makes for one beefy SoC, and a continuation of Qualcomm’s leadership in this space. I doubt we’ll see any slowing of Qualcomm’s roadmap after the 805 though. TSMC expects to be shipping 20nm wafers by the end of next year, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a 20nm successor to the 805 in late ’14/early ’15. Remember that on the last process node shift we got Krait, I wonder what we’ll get this time.
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FwFred - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
I see this more of a split of the Qualcomm line between high end smartphones and tablets than I see this as a successor to the Snapdragon 800. At 28nm and without a radio, it's pretty clear this thing is intended for tablets only. As Ars showed, it's pretty clear Qualcomm is thermally limited at 28nm, and going much wider/faster won't really help.dgingeri - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
Gimme a Windows RT tablet based on this bad boy! I like it!lmcd - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
I'd love to see Windows RT/Phone first to the market with this chip. To me, that'd be the new dawn: launch-day parity with Android on power. Apps are coming, but lackluster devices (and the whole AT&T Nokia exclusive thing) really hurt Windows Phone and Windows RT.Krysto - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
That will probably never happen, as Microsoft needs to support multiple devices at once, and they are too slow with development.Sabresiberian - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
Their new offerings coming out in December feature the Snapdragon 800. That puts them just months behind in terms of releasing tablets and phones with the top SoC. I expect Windows phones to actually catch up this year, releasing top hardware models at the same time as Android phones.cheshirster - Friday, November 29, 2013 - link
920, 820 and 8Х were amongst the first msm8960 phones.And 620 with msm8227.
Ekitrak - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
I would love to see this in a new Nexus 10 next summer. Omg just the possibility is getting me excited!Suneater - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
I can hardly believe that a 160 GFLOPS chip can win new Nexus 10 over a 400 GFLOPS Tegra 5. Google should be completely blind if they'll make it happen.A5 - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
Hahaguidryp - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
So you are still believing NVidia Hype after the Tegra 1, Tegra 2, Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 all turned up a day late and a dollar short?