Snapdragon 810: Can big.LITTLE keep the dream alive while Qualcomm works on Krait’s successor?

Snapdragon 810: Can big.LITTLE keep the dream alive while Qualcomm works on Krait’s successor?

In the lead-up to CES 2015, Qualcomm has revealed a few more details about its upcoming Snapdragon 810 SoC — the company’s first flagship 64-bit chip, which will most likely power the top Android devices released in the first half of 2015. The Snapdragon 810 is an interesting chip for a number of reasons, but most notably it’s the first flagship Snapdragon S4/800 chip to not feature Qualcomm’s own Krait CPU cores. Instead, Qualcomm went with off-the-shelf ARM Cortex A57 and A53 cores — not for performance reasons, as far as we can tell, but more so that it could compete with Apple’s perceived 64-bit advantage. Where is your own in-house 64-bit CPU core, Qualcomm?

Don’t get me wrong, the Snapdragon 810 is a beast of an SoC. Other than the CPU oddity, it looks like it will be a superb chip. There’s the Adreno 430 GPU, which should be impressively powerful; 64-bit dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM; Dolby Atmos H.265 videoencode and decode in hardware, up to 4K; and, of course, wireless capabilities that will blow your socks off. It sounds like Snapdragon 810 will support LTE Cat 9 (450Mbps down), Bluetooth 4.1, and 802.11ac WiFi. Some sites are also reporting that 802.11ad ( WiGig) up to 4Gbps will be supported. Qualcomm is also making a bit of fuss over the Snapdragon 810’s dual 14-bit ISPs (image signal processors), which can support camera sensors up to 55 megapixels and other cool computational photography applications (more on that later).

Cortex A53 and A57 relative performance, compared to Cortex A7 and A15, at current process node (28nm) and future nodes (20/16nm)

The CPU, though, is definitely a weird one. Instead of two or four Krait CPU cores, the Snapdragon 810 moves to a big.LITTLE configuration of four big Cortex A57 cores and four little Cortex A53 cores. These are off-the-shelf cores designed by ARM (as in the company that created the ARM instruction set), built on TSMC’s 20nm HPm process. The idea behind big.LITTLE is that the big, power-hungry cores only spin up when heavy lifting needs to be done, with the little cores keeping the plates spinning in between those bursts of activity. In theory, this provides high performance without sucking down too much power. In practice, early implementations of big.LITTLE weren’t very good; hopefully this implementation, with improved task scheduling support from Android, will be better.

Beyond the CPU — and really, when it comes to mobile computing, the CPU is only a small part of the overall equation — the Snapdragon 810 has some very interesting hardware features. The dual ISPs, for example, could mean that we’re about to see smartphones with a Pelican light field camera, or a dual-sensor pseudo-optical-zoom camera from Corephotonics. If you’ve read my impressions of Dolby Atmos, you’ll know that I’m very excited about its arrival on the Snapdragon platform. Hardware encode and decode of 4K video is certainly a nice-to-have, and it’ll probably be a good bullet point on the box, though I don’t know how useful it will actually be.

The Snapdragon 810 will arrive early in 2015, with the first smartphones and tablets being demonstrated at CES 2015 in January. The first half of 2015 will likely be dominated by the 810 — and then, if all goes to plan, we should finally hear about Qualcomm’s own 64-bit CPU core. When that new CPU core will actually be ready to go, however, remains to be seen.

Now read: Qualcomm, up close and personal: How the new king of mobile will keep Intel at bay