News

Samsung could manufacture Qualcomm’s 3GHz Snapdragon 820

46

Qualcomm Chips

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset is expected be quite a treat. The sour taste in folks’ mouths from the Snapdragon 810 might be assuaged by new rumors that the forthcoming 820 will be manufactured by Samsung.

Qualcomm apparently wants to win Samsung’s business back, and pegging them as the primary manufacturer as the chipset could be the ticket they need to be let back into their good graces. One might also come to the conclusion that Qualcomm wants to take advantage of Samsung’s 14nm FinFet manufacturing tech (such as the technology used for the Exynos 7420 inside the Samsung Galaxy S6) which makes for a very efficient chipset.

Efficiency is certainly what Qualcomm needs for their next go-round. The company’s Snapdragon 810 was marred early on by overheating issues, which — in some cases — could adversely affect performance (and make your phone really, really hot).

The Snapdragon 820 will be built using new 64-bit Kyro cores, and rumors suggest its clock speed will get as high as 3GHz. That’s unheard of in the mobile industry. It’s probably even overkill. But it sure is cool, and we hope they can get it right this time with Samsung’s help and expertise leading the way.

[via Gizmo China]

Quentyn Kennemer
The "Google Phone" sounded too awesome to pass up, so I bought a G1. The rest is history. And yes, I know my name isn't Wilson.

You can now buy SanDisk’s 200GB microSD card for $239 at Amazon

Previous article

Deal: Grab the ASUS ZenWatch for $50 off at Best Buy

Next article

You may also like

46 Comments

  1. No question SAMSUNG is android and technology as I’ve always said since May 2011. Exynos processor beats the pants off of Snapdragon so easily it’s comical. Samsung will move forward with the Exynos 7422 all in one solution combining CPU, GPU, RAM, storage and modem in the Note5.

    1. The Note 5 could be an absolute world beater. It should be.

    2. To be clear. The Exynos was faster in 2011. But the 2012 release of the S4 took that crown. Snapdragons were faster from 2012 until 2015 when the Galaxy S6 was released with the 7422. Now Exynos has taken the top spot again, but it has not “always” been that way at all.

      Yup, the Note5 is looking really good.

      1. Not if it has an internal battery and microSD card I see many people shying away from them. iSamsung has turned into what it used to make fun of, ironically.

        1. https://youtu.be/4M9UhtTRM1Q?t=39s

          I do hope they keep their Note line untouched as far as Micro SD and a user-replaceable battery. We’ve discussed this before how the Note line seems to be geared and marketed towards the power users among us who dearly depend on those two capabilities.

          We do have an S variant now with at least Micro SD support but it’s an AT&T exclusive. How people are still doing exclusives these days is beyond me. Almost cruel shutting out potential customers like that.

    3. Funny how the Galaxy S6 can barely keep ahead of the Snapdragon 808 backed LG G4 in an app opening contest, and then lose utterly in the second round because of the poor RAM management in the following speed test:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5mRrAkCiV8

      1. That’s something a software update will fix, nothing to do with the soc smh. Based off of the first run, the S6 was clearly beasting the G4, and the ram management issue has been addressed and actually a developer on XDA already figured it out a simple fix, I’m currently running the fix and it’s night and day difference, the S6 is the fastest phone out right now, until the Note 5 comes out that is. And no I don’t get paid by Samsung or in any connection to Richard LOL. http://forum.xda-developers.com/tmobile-galaxy-s6/general/s6-ram-management-discussion-t3128229/post61260005#post61260005

        1. I’m not saying it isn’t the fastest, but a 10 second difference on the first round means that the severely maligned 808 processor really was well optimized. Also, give them props for proper RAM management out of the box…

    4. I thought you were an HTC troll a few years ago.

      1. He was…

      2. He was a htc troll a few years ago. He’s what you call a flip flop! Whatever he likes is king. Lmao!!

    5. Says the guy who used to claim that “all in one solution combining CPU, GPU, RAM, storage and modem” was Samsung’s ePoP chip, which wasn’t even remotely true.

    6. exynos is off the shelf arm design. The only thing that makes it fast is the process, which will come to all other processors. If anything, the wide pathways of apple’s cyclone will set it apart in the next generation. Pretending to know what you’re talking about is not your strong suit.

  2. 3GHz? When is ARM going to start getting used for desktops? Also, anything with a CPU that fast is going to have crap battery life

    1. huh?

    2. You do realize GHz isn’t everything in terms of performance (and battery life)?

      1. I do realize that as I have built several machines in my spare time. And in my experience no matter how power-efficient Qualcomm or Samsung makes these, they are still going to suck up a crap-ton of power and produce a crap-ton of heat

    3. What mcl630 said.. A processor can be clocked to 10GHz!! If the optimization is on point and the UI does not need all 10GHz at all times….then battery life should no be an issue….

      1. You have obviously never overclocked a CPU.

        1. Overclocking has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Mobile processors only run at their maximum speed when needed, most of the time they’re running at slower clock speeds.

          If you had an x86 processor and an ARM processor clocked at the speed, the x86 would blow away the ARM in performance. And the ARM would use less power (and thus have better battery life), although x86 is narrowing the gap.

          1. Not necessarily, in favt , x86 is arguably a less efficient (CISC) architecture in comparison to more modern ARM (RISC) architectures. There’s a lot more to performance than instruction sets, architectures and clock speeds.

  3. Faster is never overkill. Developers always push the limits of processing power.

    1. oh yea, just give us even more cores instead! /s

    2. No, they get lazy

  4. A Nexus with this tech, I’m throwing my wallet at you, Google!

  5. Oh how I want them to get this SD820 right!

  6. Were the issues with the 810 shown to be manufacturing related, or design related? If they were design related, changing manufacturers doesn’t really mean anything.

    1. Well when the 820 is Different in Design and Samsung is regarded as one-of-if-not the top chip manufacturer… Then it means Alot. Just saying…

      1. Assuming there are no manufacturing-caused defects, who the manufacturer is should make no difference at all. Which is what I’m asking, were the problems with the 810 caused by the manufacturer (TSMC?) or design (which would be Qualcomm’s fault)? If it was the design, switching manufacturers wouldn’t help.

    2. Or OS related. Samsung doesn’t have good battery life either

      1. The M9 (which of course uses the 810) gets decent battery life and the update that is coming supposedly improves upon it, so I’d say no.

        1. Decent? Maybe.
          But isn’t it odd that the improvements in manufacturing, combined with a bigger battery, results in less battery life than kit Kat? (Which in turn had less battery life than jelly bean)

          I’d love to see a kk Rom running on the m9 or g4. I already know lollipop kills the g2..

          1. Well since the M9 shipped with Lollipop I can’t really compare. But I can say my old N5’s battery life took a nosedive when Lollipop came along. It got a little better with 5.1 though. I wasn’t still using it when 5.1.1 came out for it, but I’ve heard it got a lot better with that update.

    3. Kind of design, but manufacturing at a smaller size helps. Qualcomm is going to be doing both with the SD820, though: smaller fab AND custom-designed Kryo cores. (Right now, they’re just using ARM’s reference A57/A53 designs, which is where most of the issues are coming from.)

  7. I love Qualcomm chips, both because of battery gutu, quick charge, and project zeroeth. But I’m not sure a 3 Ghz processor makes sense unless the octacore is broken down to something like:

    2 cores: 3 Ghz
    2 cores: 2.5 Ghz
    2 cores: 2 Ghz
    2 cores: 1.5 Ghz

    Combined with 14 nm infrastructure this would allow for kick ass performance but also amazing battery life, especially running qualcomm’s battery guru app.

    Oh and of course, quick charge 3.0 would be sweet, if we could get a peak recharge time at least 50% faster than quick charge 2.0.

    1. You do know that the speed per core scales independently and that all cores running at max speed is not typical, yeah?

  8. I am very confused by this. So please someone in the known can hopefully clarify.

    I thought Qualcomm WAS a chip manufacturer? If so, then having Samsung make it seems very odd as this would make Qualcomms entire livelihood irrelevant.

    This is like being a widget maker and having your competition make your widget for you.

    Unless these two are sharing manufacturing facilities? Im at a loss here

    1. Qualcomm is a fabless manufacturer – they have no manufacturing facilities.

      Most of the Snapdragons out there have been built by TSMC in Taiwan – a HUGE chip foundry.

      And this wouldn’t be the first time that Samsung built Snapdragons – they were one of the producers of the S4, probably the most popular SoC in 2012. Samsung actually produced those in Texas at the same facility where they were cranking out Apple chips.

      Neither does Samsung care what design it is so long as they can move iron – at least one of the earlier Galaxies (SGS2??) came with literally every high-end SoC of its day, but all the while carrying the same model number. And that’s a common practice as well.

      1. Im sure a quick Google search and Wiki would have told me this. I figured they outsourced there production to China. Just figured as big as they were using someone like Samsung would have been cost prohibitive.

        1. I knew that because I provided test solutions to all of them. So there you go – actual search. :D

        2. No, it’s cost effective. In business you do what you’re best at, ideally.

  9. Every oem should have used the exynos chips this year. Disappointments like the M9, G Flex 2 and Z4 would have turned into beasts instantly.

    1. I don’t know if it’s quite that simple. You think Samsung will sell it to just anyone?

      1. I don’t know how it works exactly but money talks :)

  10. A 3ghz chip isn’t “overkill” clock speed has meant less and less for years. What’s important is the actual architecture of the chip, how powerful/efficient it is.

  11. I’d like to see a versus battle between the M9, S6, and LG, optimized for performance, unlocked bootloader, stock android, and the best roms. If anything, that would show how far you could take ’em.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in News