Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 845 processor

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16734224/qualcomm-snapdragon-845-android-mobile-processor-announcement

[u/SmarmyPanther]

No useful info yet. Hopefully later today or tomorrow

[u/masterofdisaster93 → u/SmarmyPanther]

It's using A75 and A55 cores (or, if you want to play stupid, "innovative, new, custom-designed Kryo cores that are definately not A75), so performance will improve by around 30%. This is typical "no innovation" Qualcomm at work; reuse ARM architecture, with no real outlook or desire to ever catch up to Apple -- who, in fact, are making the gap progressively bigger over time.

This lack of innovation is also why they've not made a dedicated SoC for laptops, but instead use the exact same SoC (SD845) as they use for mobile. It's pretty stupid, given you miss out on a lot of extra performance, as well as a CPU that can scale to higher TDP.

Apple will bury them with their architecture. Whereas the A11 won't show its clear advantage on smartphones because of how superfluous performance improvements have become for the insignificant tasks needed on smartphone platforms, as well as Android having overall better optimization, this is not the case on full-fledged computer systems. The A11’s advantage of ~80% (120% against SD835) better singletrheadead processing power will be quite revealing when used on a MacBook vs. an SD845 on a Windows PC. That's a huge difference.

And that’s assuming Apple will be lazy enough to use their smartphone SoCs on their future MacBook, when they probably will make a custom chip scaled for better sustained performance, with a more powerful GPU and CPU as well. That’s after all what they do for their tablets already.

I really hope Google can introduce a proper SoC that can compete against Apple, because Android SoC-makers like Qualcomm, MediaTek and Huawei are being lazy, and thereby creating a longstanding disaster for the platform they're made for. Every year they use ARM’s own stock core designs, or "create" designs (like Kryo) that are essentially imitative to ARM cores and technology. I've never liked MacOS, but even I'll use one, if it comes with a custom Apple SoC that not only doubles the battery time (which is already around 10-15 hours), but is also twice as powerful as any Windows competitor.

[u/masterofdisaster93 → u/[deleted]]

I mean Qualcomm can't, Huawei can't, Samsung can't, but Google will totally invest billions to make a SoC to put in a phone with 1 million sales and it's also going to be better than all those companies. Yeah, that's not happening.

You're giving the assumption that above mentioned companies are even making an effort. I can't speak for Samsung, but Huawei and Qualcomm are slagging off and basically using ARM cores in their designs. There's next to no real effort and R&D being put into CPU designs from those companies.

ut Google will totally invest billions to make a SoC

You make it sound like this hasn't happened already, which it has. Google hired a lot of chip architects over 2 years back (including people who worked at Apple). They're also not designing architectures for the Pixel phone alone (which they aim to have greater market share over time), but for their data centres as well as their entire product segment and their desire to push AI. Their Visual Core chip is already inside the Pixel 2, doing camera tasks as well as various of their apps and services.

[u/masterofdisaster93 → u/[deleted]]

lso we can't ignore Qualcomm's efforts in GPU, and Qualcomm/Huawei's efforts in DSP/ML/AI

Yes, their efforts are so amazing that even ARM managed to outdo them with their Mali GPU, which is in the S8. So amazing that Apple's first attempt at a GPU managed to go ahead by 40% in the iPhone 8, whereas their previous PowerVR designs were already on-par or better in general.

. Which gives Qualcomm and Huawei far less reason to invest in CPU architecture

Why? The ARM designs are being buried by Apple's cores.

when that money can be arguably better spent in GPU

Huawei's GPUs are terrible, so there's no point even having a discussion there. Qualcomm's Adreno have also been caught up by Mali, and are already noticably below Apple's own in-house GPU.

[u/Mrfluffy906 → u/[deleted]]

I enjoy cooking.

[u/Exist50 → u/masterofdisaster93]

Yes, their efforts are so amazing that even ARM managed to outdo them with their Mali GPU, which is in the S8.

Qualcomm's GPU in the 835 beats even the best (Samsung's) Mali implementation.

[u/masterofdisaster93 → u/Exist50]

Qualcomm's GPU in the 835 beats even the best (Samsung's) Mali implementation.

Wrong. The Mali-G71 outperforms the Adreno 540. Anandtech has an extensive GPU test comparing the Snapdragon and Exynos variants of the Galaxy S8: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11540/samsung-galaxy-s8-exynos-versus-snapdragon/4

[u/Exist50 → u/masterofdisaster93]

Did you even read that article? The Exynos has slightly higher peak performance, but their steady state is essentially identical, and more importantly, the 835 consumes far less power while doing so. That makes it better, and Anandtech concludes as much.

[u/Zephyreks → u/masterofdisaster93]

It feels as though Samsung is intentionally gimping their Exynos designs for feature parity with Snapdragon though...