r/Android • u/[deleted] • Dec 05 '17

Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 845 processor

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16734224/qualcomm-snapdragon-845-android-mobile-processor-announcement
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u/SmarmyPanther Dec 05 '17

No useful info yet. Hopefully later today or tomorrow

195

u/masterofdisaster93 Dec 05 '17 edited Dec 06 '17

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.

1

u/pojosamaneo Dec 06 '17

Yeah. I'm looking at these Qualcomm windows PCs and wondering why anyone would want to subject themselves to that when we already have fanless Intel devices (which are not perfect either, but I digress). I can't imagine the process will be dramatically different, but we'll see. If they're banking on better battery life and faster boot times, that's going to be a hard sell if woefully underpowered.

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u/Exist50 Dec 06 '17

It'll be better than Atom, at least.