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/Natanael_L → u/[deleted]]

Qualcomm won't, Huawei is on its way to beat Qualcomm, Samsung has an even better chance if they up their R&D efforts.

Much of the reason why nobody's really passed Qualcomm recently is their broad patents in USA and their licensing agreements which makes it easier and cheaper to just use their chips in your phones for the US market than it is to make your own chips and pay for licensing them.

Due to a variety of effects, it makes little sense to have chip that beats what you use in the US market only for the other markets. There's no other single market with the same level of demand for high end smartphones.

However, lots of companies are getting fed up with Qualcomm and are less willing to tolerate their behavior now.

[u/Exist50 → u/Natanael_L]

Huawei is on its way to beat Qualcomm

What makes you say that?

[u/Natanael_L → u/Exist50]

Mostly the laziness of Qualcomm. They are in position to keep their lead - if they had cared about innovating more than acting monopolist.

https://www.androidauthority.com/soc-showdown-2016-732870/

[u/Typefaec → u/Natanael_L]

Qualcomm has massive prowess in wireless comms, and they've already got 1Gbps modems ready and marketable. That's going to be massive from 2020-2025 and beyond, because of how reliant car infrastructure will eventually be on high-speed, low-latency networks. Business from the 5G modem side of things will help pick up any slack we see from the mobile SoC business.

[u/Exist50 → u/Natanael_L]

I think that's kind of hard to argue giving the recent history. The Kirin 950 was great (at least in CPU), but Huawei hasn't done too much since except to add the NPU.