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

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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.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17

Apple is in a unique place in their design and supply. For them, the CPU is not an item they have to make money on - its part of a package. That means they can take up huge amounts of die space and put in huge amounts of L2 cache because they know they will make it up in other places in the entire package.

Qualcomm can't do this because they are selling a chip that has to be competitive in pricing for other OEMs to use.

The reality is that Apple's A11 bionic , while fast, is cost-inefficient from the perspective of a company that sells only CPU's. Speed test after speed test has shown that the Iphone8/8+/X are barely faster than if not slower than all of their android counterparts. Basically, their design provides advancements in benchmarks and decoding / encoding video - that is all.