
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 and 808 Processors - matt42
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms-snapdragon-808810-20nm-highend-64bit-socs-with-lte-category-67-support-in-2015
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higherpurpose
Very disappointed about this generation of processors from Qualcomm. It seems
like they were caught off-guard by the introduction of an ARMv8 processor by
Apple last year, and soon after they scrambled to release an ARMv8 chip -
_any_ ARMv8 chip, so they don't look like they're as behind as they really
are.

That's how they announced the Cortex A53-based chip as soon as possible early
this year (that one was probably already planned, since they use stock ARM
CPU's at the mid-range), and now a Cortex A57-based one, even though they
licensed the ARMv8 architecture a few years ago, and they were _supposed to_
ship Krait's successor 2 years after its introduction, which would be right
about now, and before ARM's own stock designs. What's the point of buying the
architecture license, if ARM itself can outcompete you, and forces you to buy
their stock CPU designs anyway?

The only explanation is that they were trying to milk Krait for at least 3-3.5
years, before they were planning to launch their own ARMv8-based Krait
successor. Apple seems to have screwed their plans, and forced them to buy
Cortex A57 for the high-end.

I'm even less impressed with the GPU. The high-end one by the looks of it will
probably score around 200 Gflops, while Nvidia's mobile Kepler is already over
300. And the 4k support and "live HDR" for video? Please, that's old news.
Everything about these chips screams "rushed" and "repackaged" (even their
names).

~~~
mrpippy
Anand stated in a previous article that Chinese customers were basically
demanding 64-bit 4 or 8-core SoCs, just to tick checkboxes on a spec sheet.

Of course it's pretty well established that 2 fast/wide cores (like Apple and
Qualcomm's in-house designs) are better for current mobile software than 4 or
8 slower ones. And Android doesn't take any advantage of ARMv8 right now.

Another sad example of marketing trumping engineering reality.

~~~
TwoBit
I think games that use take advantage of high parallelism would do better on
the 8 core devices. We just don't see much of that kind of game in the mobile
market.

~~~
TylerE
We don't see that on the _desktop_ market.

~~~
zanny
We also don't see many 8 core chips on the desktop market. Chicken and egg
problem.

Very few people have the incentive or funds to get either the hyperthreaded
i7s (which don't _really_ have 4 cores), the 8 core Xeons or the 8 core AMD
high end parts.

~~~
TylerE
Very few games can even use two threads to full capacity.

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iandanforth
One thing you may have missed from CES that these chips enable is the
ultrasound pen. I think this is freakin cool technology!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwmS126YX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwmS126YX0)

~~~
ChuckMcM
I am sure I am the only one who thought "Gee, why is Broadcom selling a sonic
screwdriver?" :-)

That said, I'm curious how they expect this to work, although I expect in
typical Broadcom fashion there will be no way to get information on it :-(

~~~
ZoF
Even bigger news should be the fact that Qualcomm == Broadcom in your
estimation :)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sigh. Its true. I'm guessing they sit in the same set of neurons or something.
When I'm reading about modems and RF gear I always read it as Qualcomm but for
CPUs I tend transliterate Qualcomm into Broadcom way to frequently.

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Spittie
AnandTech as a nice, more informative article:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms-
snapdragon-8088...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms-
snapdragon-808810-20nm-highend-64bit-socs-with-lte-category-67-support-
in-2015)

~~~
dang
Thanks! We changed it.

~~~
leoc
If you're going to be changing the linked articles in submissions regularly
now, you should change the site to automatically mark comments which were in
response to an article which is no longer the linked article.

~~~
dang
> regularly now

We've always made these changes regularly. The only new thing is that we've
been commenting about it, hopefully making things a little clearer than
before.

We're not closed to implementing something to reduce the intelligibility gap
you're talking about. But it would have to be very simple, i.e. unobtrusive
and fit in with the existing design. If anyone knows a simple way to do it,
please email it to hn@ycombinator.com.

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paul_f
Step back for a minute and realize how astonishing these devices are. As
someone who was in the semiconductor industry in the late 80s and 90s I am
just blown away.

We are putting magic on chips

~~~
sizzle
what were some of the cutting edge specs like back then?

~~~
rodgerd
Like for like? I was programming on Acorn Archimedes 310s back in 1987: an ARM
2 clocked at 8 MHz. The memory and video controllers were discrete chips.
Acorn claimed that their ARM 2's pipeline design let it run integer operations
at the same speed as a 20 - 25 MHz 386.

IIRC it only had 23 instructions, making it the most pure RISC design to be
available off the shelf.

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TD-Linux
That's a lot of die area for video decoding! It's substantially larger than
their entire set of CPUs.

I've got a feeling that full-hardware video decoding is going to die off,
having worked on it myself. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to leave so
much silicon idle most of the time, when you could just accelerate a more
general purpose processor or GPU to have very wide integer paths.

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amckenna
These chips look pretty cool. That's quite a bit of power in one package.

On a side note - for a press release it seemed kind of casual: "And because
the only thing sadder than a selfie is a selfie that cannot be shared,
remember you can upload these high-res images and HDR videos faster with the
Snapdragon processor’s 4th generation 4G LTE solution."

~~~
ldayley
The link is for a corporate blog post, not the official presser (which is
linked at the bottom). The blog site appears to be aiming towards consumers
than the press release, which is as formal as any other tech release.

EDIT: Mod has changed URL to Anandtech review from original link

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infocollector
Anyone knows the expected price points of the various versions?

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z3phyr
I am still waiting for the public release of their NPUs :)

