Qualcomm reveals all details about Snapdragon 820-soc

Qualcomm officially announced its Snapdragon 820 soc at an event in New York. The quad-core CPU uses Qualcomm’s own Kryo cores and is, according to the manufacturer, twice as fast as the Snapdragon 810.

As early as March, Qualcomm announced the arrival of the Snapdragon 820 at Mobile World Congress. During the year, the chip manufacturer already released various details about the chip, but now all information is known. Qualcomm, for example, says that the soc is made on a 14nm finfet process.

Unlike the Snapdragon 810, the new soc does not use ARM Cortex cores, the Snapdragon 820 contains four Qualcomm-designed Kryo cores with a maximum speed of 2.2GHz. Compared to its predecessor, the Snapdragon 820 is, according to the manufacturer, twice as fast and 30 percent more efficient. The Snapdragon 810 had problems with overheating, this may have been solved in the new soc. The CPU is assisted by an Adreno 530 GPU. This would not only be faster, but also 40 percent more economical than the Adreno 430, which is in the Snapdragon 810.

The image processor in the soc supports cameras with a resolution of up to 28 megapixels and can process ultra-HD videos. The chip can also control displays with a 4k resolution. Qualcomm also promises better photos in low light due to the improved image processing. A modem is integrated in the soc with support for 4g download speeds of up to 600Mbps, the maximum upload speed is 150Mbps.

Presumably, many smartphone manufacturers will use the Snapdragon 820 in their top models in 2016. Currently, most manufacturers use the Snapdragon 810 in their most expensive Android smartphones. Although it is not yet known which smartphones will use the chip, Qualcomm on Twitter know that at least sixty devices are planned that will have the new soc on board. In the first half of 2016, the first smartphones with Snapdragon 820-soc will appear.