.......claims 20nm from TSMC
Inside Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810
Jon Peddie, President, Jon Peddie Research
12/12/2014 04:35 PM EST
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 is not only a killer part, it has raised the bar on what a mobile SoC has to be in 2015.
First publically mentioned in April 2014, the Snapdragon 810 was positioned as Qualcomm's new flagship application processor and potential king of the hill in mobile SoCs. Now, eight months later we got to see how and if the 810 lived up to such a heady promise.
Prior to the official announcement rumors said the new part was running hot and its advanced memory controller was not working. So much for rumors. Last night I held two tablets and four phones with Snapdragon 810 chips in them, and they were cool, in every sense of the word. They drove a 4K (3840 x 2160) TV, took 4K videos, ran AAA games, and had at least a 5-inch HD displays -- finished, branded products just waiting to be released.
I am convinced Qualcomm is on track to deliver commercial devices with Snapdragon 810 in mid-2015. In fact, I expect you'll see products at CES, and probably in the market before the second quarter.
The 810 marks many milestones:
Qualcomm's first 20nm (TSMC) SoC
The industry's first multi-channel 4G LTE SoC supporting Category 9 Carrier Aggregation
Qualcomm's first 64-bit ARMv8 CPUs (four A57 @ ~2GHz, and four A53 @ 1.55GHz)
The first chip to use the Adreno 430 GPU
Qualcomm's first support for a dual 14-bit ISP camera
The first dual channel 1600 MHz LLPDDR4 memory implementation in the industry
The first hardware implementation of 4K HEVC/H.265 video encode
The first UFS 2.0 storage support
Qualcomm's first WCD9330 analog codec
Qualcomm took several chances incorporating so many new features in the 810, an unusual move for a big company, and one loaded with potential problems. Probably the most adventuresome for a chip with so many new designs was the move to a 20-nm TSMC process.
One of the big gambles was running in a mobile device the LPDDR4 at 1600 MHz, delivering a total bandwidth of 25.6GB/s. (It is 2 x 32-bit channels, a total width of 64 bits). That provides the bandwidth and data width needed for high-performance graphics, as well as Open CL applications.
In using ARM Cortex A57/A53 cores, Qualcomm deviated from its partice of designing its own ARM cores. The ARM cores have been available for some time, several other SoC designer/builders use it, and so it does not represent much risk for Qualcomm.
Qualcomm upgraded camera supports gyro-stabilization and 3D noise reduction and is capable of supporting 1.2 GPixel/s throughput and image sensors up to 55 MPixels. That allows 4K video capture at the expanded color gamut needed for true UltraHD.
The video processor is also the first to incorporate a hardware H.265 encoder. In the previous Snapdragon 805, you could capture 4K video, but not directly drive a 4K screen. The 810 has frame buffer compression and external 4K display support via HDMI 1.4, delivering 4K video at 30 frames/s or 1080p video at 120 f/s.
The new Adreno 430 GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.1 plus hardware tessellation, geometry shaders and programmable blending. It is designed to deliver up to 30% faster graphics performance and 100% faster GPU-compute performance compared to its predecessor while reducing power consumption by up to 20%. The 430 also sports a new level of GPU security for protected composition and management of premium video and other multimedia.
Qualcomm claims the 20-nm node is more cost-effective than 28-nm HPM and about on par with the cost of 28-nm LP. The company also used the 20-nm process for its modem in the MDM9235, a category 6 LTE-Advanced cellular baseband, and the first 20 nm part
