Due out sometime next year, the Snapdragon 820 has been touted as the most optimal fit for power, performance, form factor requirements that a next generation graphic and video centric mobile devices are calling for.
As graphic-rich virtual and augmented reality, computer vision, and 4K UHD are de facto features of smart phones, the mobile SoCs are coming built with multiple processor cores that are differently dedicated to specific tasks.
That's where the forte of the Snapdragon 820 mobile SoC comes in.
The 820 is engineered with custom-built, highly optimized cores designed for heterogeneous computing—the ability to combine different functional cores of the system-on-chip (SoC), like the CPU, GPU and DSP cores.
Qualcomm Technologies has custom designed each of the individual cores of the Snapdragon 820. Especially, it has built a CPU core on its own architecture rather than off-the-shelf ARM core.
Qualcomm Kryo is its first custom-designed 64-bit quad-core CPU, as part of a comprehensive redesign of our premium-tier mobile processor.
Kryo is tightly integrated with the Adreno 530 GPU and Hexagon 680 DSP and is designed for high-performance mobile computing along with the latest in multimedia and connectivity.
Kryo follows the popular custom Krait CPU, which powers the Snapdragon 800, 801, and 805 processors.
Qualcomm said that the Kryo was purposefully engineered to satisfy the two conflicting design schemes that require highest possible performance, but lowest ever power consumption.
To the end, Qualcomm has fabricated the Kryo with the latest 14nm FinFET technology, achieving blazing clock speeds of up to 2.2 GHz.
As a result, the Snapdragon 820 outperform previous Snapdragon 810 by 2 times, while accomplishing up to 2 times the power efficiency.
When combined with the other heterogeneous elements of the Snapdragon 820, Qualcomm said, Kryo is instrumental in delivering the user experience, innovation, and efficiency.
Qualcomm's chip architecture innovations don't stop there. The Snapdragon 820 also come built with a task allocation management algorithm called as Symphony System Manager
Because of the heterogeneous nature of Snapdragon 820, increasingly more tasks are shared among the CPU, GPU, and DSP, as well as with special purpose components such as the Qualcomm Spectra camera ISP.
The Symphony System Manger is a technology that intelligently allocate each core to perform the most optimal task. The smart task allocation is leading to cuts in power consumption
While some processors limit their system management to CPU cores, for example, Symphony is designed to manage the entire system-on-chip in different configurations so that the most efficient and effective combination of processors and specialized cores are chosen to get the job done as quickly as possible, with the least amount of power.
For example, when a user is taking a picture, Symphony responds to the system demand making sure that the right components are powered up running at the needed frequency and only as long as needed. These components include CPU, Spectra ISP, Snapdragon Display Engine, GPU, GPS, and memory system.
When these purpose-built powerhouses are combined with precise system management, new levels of efficiency and amazing user experiences await.