Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 820 and Zeroth Platform
by Joshua Ho on March 2, 2015 3:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- SoCs
- MWC 2015
- Snapdragon 820
Today, Qualcomm is announcing the new Zeroth Platform, which is enabled by the Snapdragon 820 SoC.
While Qualcomm is avoiding any real disclosure of the SoC at this point, we do know that the Snapdragon 820 will be built on a FinFET process, which could be either TSMC’s 16nm or Samsung’s 14nm process. In addition to all of the improvements that the move to a new process brings, Qualcomm is finally introducing their custom ARMv8 CPU core, named Kryo. Unfortunately, there are no real details here either, but given that there’s only one architecture named it’s likely that Qualcomm is moving away from big.LITTLE with the Snapdragon 820.
The final detail regarding Snapdragon 820 is that it will begin sampling in the second half of 2015, which should mean that we can expect it to be in devices some time either at the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016. Ultimately, the fact that Qualcomm has come up with a custom ARMv8 CPU architecture in such a short time continues to show just how quickly Qualcomm can respond to changing market conditions, something that we first saw with the Snapdragon 810.
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tuxRoller - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
I think that everyone knows who is your preferred provider of ip...Laststop311 - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Said it from the start the very first day i heard about the 810 not using custom cores that QC was jus using this to throw 64 bit out there and it will not b worth buying and wait for their custom 64 bit core.tuxRoller - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
I wonder if this is going to continue the trend of Qualcomms custom solutions being, clock for clock, slower than ots arm solutions.Also, let's hope that the next adreno is a redesign.
bartoni - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Qualcomm 820 is likely Samsung 14nm, ramping 4Q15.Next Samsung SoC with their own custom ARMv8 core is coming too.
Zhongrui - Wednesday, March 4, 2015 - link
Glad to see "Qualcomm is moving away from big.LITTLE with the Snapdragon 820.". big.LITTLE is a very stupid idea, just like Newton opened a big hole for big cat and at the same time open a small hole for small cat. LITTLE is totally unnecessary. If one really wants to save energy, you can shut down some big cores and tune down their frequency. They should use the space of LITTLE cores to increase more caches (especially L0/L1) for the big cores.ahmedwolf - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
Sd820 benchmark on geekbench 1732 single core performance @3Ghz compered to exynos 7420 a57 core 1486 @2.1Ghz and sd 620 a72 core 1512 @1.8Ghz it like modified a53 core can perform the same @3.5or 3.6Ghz