Samsung to drop Qualcomm chip (810) because it overheats

[martinrox1568]

Their competition is the A7 and A8, both are better in every way but graphics off screen. I also stated that I don't like the nic that they make in my motherboard.... way to ignore that

Yes I ignored the nic part because having a crap nic in no way effects their ability to produce  mobile chips and because all extra nic software sucks no matter the vendor. However, its not fair to compare to the A8 as that has come out Q3 2014 and should compete with the 800 which was available in Q2 2013. The 805 also came out in Q1 2014 compared to the A8 it is still 6 months old, which is a decade in arm processors. And yet even though the 800 is older than the a7, it still beats or goes even with it

[Mew]

Yes I ignored the nic part because having a crap nic in no way effects their ability to produce  mobile chips and because all extra nic software sucks no matter the vendor. However, its not fair to compare to the A8 as that has come out Q3 2014 and should compete with the 800 which was available in Q2 2013. The 805 also came out in Q1 2014 compared to the A8 it is still 6 months old, which is a decade in arm processors. And yet even though the 800 is older than the a7, it still beats or goes even with it

 

I didn't say anything about Qualcomm's lack of "ability to produce mobile chips," but rather their inability to create quality products that aren't so niche. Their quad cores have been very underwhelming, their 810 is using a similar design to existing Exynos socs that haven't really performed as well as people would have hoped. Qualcomm's modems are their better products though, they were pretty far ahead of everyone in their LTE modems.

 

As you can see, the A7 in the 5s, a phone that's over an year old, is still faster than the 805 in the Note 4 and tied with the Nexus 6, a phone that was released a couple months ago. The A8 should be going up the 810 that will be released later this year.

 

I'm interested in seeing nVidia scale down their X1 into a lower power envelop to be used in phones, although their track record on that isn't too good (tegra 3).

 

[Pomfinator]

Yes I ignored the nic part because having a crap nic in no way effects their ability to produce  mobile chips and because all extra nic software sucks no matter the vendor. However, its not fair to compare to the A8 as that has come out Q3 2014 and should compete with the 800 which was available in Q2 2013. The 805 also came out in Q1 2014 compared to the A8 it is still 6 months old, which is a decade in arm processors. And yet even though the 800 is older than the a7, it still beats or goes even with it

I don't know what benches you've been looking at, but the A7 is much better than the 800 in raw benchmark performance, because high IPC.  Hell it was good enough that they were either too lazy or too arrogant to even make an A7x for the Air.

[dizmo]

Samsung probably using the cheap plastic back cover like all its other phones.

I imagine it'll be more like the A series with an aluminum body.

Lots of their newer phones aren't made of cheap plastic, uninformed one.

[patrickjp93]

I think you have that backwards.

No, he doesn't. Apart from heat dissipation aluminum is pointless to have in a phone. There are stronger, lighter plastics.

[dizmo]

No, he doesn't. Apart from heat dissipation aluminum is pointless to have in a phone. There are stronger, lighter plastics.

Feel.

And before you spout off about how it doesn't feel more premium, that's completely a preference and personal perception point that cannot be argued.

Lots of people feel it's higher quality. Hence why it's so widely used on higher end devices. People like metal.

[LAwLz]

I imagine it'll be more like the A series with an aluminum body.

Lots of their newer phones aren't made of cheap plastic, uninformed one.

Yeah it will probably be like the Note 4. Aluminum on the sides, plastic on the back. Personally I really like that approach. It doesn't complicate antenna tuning and it allows for all the benefits of a plastic back (like wireless charging and removable back).

 

It's just a shame plastic have gotten such a bad rep. People just feel something with their hands and then go "this feels cheap so therefore it must be bad". You can't judge qualities like strength and durability by just touching something.

 

 

 

Their competition is the A7 and A8, both are better in every way but graphics off screen. I also stated that I don't like the nic that they make in my motherboard.... way to ignore that

Ehm what? The Snapdragon 800 is still better than the A8 in terms of CPU performance (assuming all 4 cores can be used fairly well). The gap is a lot closer now with the A8 but it was pretty big with the A7, and even bigger before that.

Apple has generally been lagging behind in terms of CPU performance but excelled at GPU performance. It's the exact opposite of what you are trying to say. Apple has been great in terms of single threaded performance since the A6, but it's still only a dual core with a low frequency. The higher IPC is just not enough to make up for those things.

 

If you don't believe me just look at GeekBench (don't use crap like BaseMark, it's not strictly a CPU benchmark).

 

I didn't say anything about Qualcomm's lack of "ability to produce mobile chips," but rather their inability to create quality products that aren't so niche. Their quad cores have been very underwhelming, their 810 is using a similar design to existing Exynos socs that haven't really performed as well as people would have hoped. Qualcomm's modems are their better products though, they were pretty far ahead of everyone in their LTE modems.

How are their products niche? I'd say they are anything but niche. They are freaking everywhere.

 

Their quad cores have been great for a long time. You have to remember that Krait is pretty old at this point and it aged very well with the help of new manufacturing processes and minor tweaks. Hell the first dual core Krait chip was better than Nvidia's quad core (see HTC One S vs HTC One X).

These days it really needs an update but I don't think it's fair to call what has been a great product for several years "underwhelming".

 

The newest Exynos has not been tested in AArch64 mode yet (hopefully that is coming with the Galaxy S 6). That might give a decent performance boost. Even without that, it's still the highest performing SoC in terms of multi threaded performance and fares pretty well in single threaded tests.

 

As you can see, the A7 in the 5s, a phone that's over an year old, is still faster than the 805 in the Note 4 and tied with the Nexus 6, a phone that was released a couple months ago. The A8 should be going up the 810 that will be released later this year.

There will be an overlapping period where the A7 is competing against the 810. We will have handset(s) with Snapdragon 810 be on sale, in stores, in less than 2 weeks.

The BaseMark test is pretty bad if you ask me. The reason being that I have no idea what it measures. It, like AnTuTu, just spits out random numbers. The scores you posted are also the total system score which includes all the tests (not just the CPU and/or GPU). Hell, part of the score is based on something they call "web browsing". I have no idea how that's valuated (because it's not a CPU, GPU or memory test apparently) but it makes up a big part of the score.

[Mew]

 

How are their products niche? I'd say they are anything but niche. They are freaking everywhere.

 

Their quad cores have been great for a long time. You have to remember that Krait is pretty old at this point and it aged very well with the help of new manufacturing processes and minor tweaks. Hell the first dual core Krait chip was better than Nvidia's quad core (see HTC One S vs HTC One X).

These days it really needs an update but I don't think it's fair to call what has been a great product for several years "underwhelming".

 

 

Qualcomm tried to play catch up to nVidia when the Tegra 3 was released so that they would also have a quad core. Having a quad core means higher theoretical performance at the expense of lower real world performance because you are dedicating more of your resources to the extra cores, which is remedied by increasing the clock speed. However, we live in the real world where single threaded performance is king, especially in mobile smartphones where new apps are easier to be coded for 1 fast core rather than 4 slow cores. nVidia acknowledged this when they made the dual core version of the K1 last year. 

 

 

There will be an overlapping period where the A7 is competing against the 810. We will have handset(s) with Snapdragon 810 be on sale, in stores, in less than 2 weeks.

The BaseMark test is pretty bad if you ask me. The reason being that I have no idea what it measures. It, like AnTuTu, just spits out random numbers. The scores you posted are also the total system score which includes all the tests (not just the CPU and/or GPU). Hell, part of the score is based on something they call "web browsing". I have no idea how that's valuated (because it's not a CPU, GPU or memory test apparently) but it makes up a big part of the score.

 

 

I'm not going to bother copying all the pictures over, but the "System" benchmark in Basemark is just the CPU tests, "Overall" is the one that includes gpu, cpu, memory, web, etc. As you can see the 805 of the Note 4 is tied with the A7 of the 5s in the cpu benchmark of "System", in the gpu benchmark, Apple's socs are pretty weak. I suppose web consists of how smooth and fast navigating websites are so it's no surprise iPhones do pretty well here considering how optimized safari is and how much of a difference IPC makes in that. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8613/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4-review/7

 

[GzeroD]

 I'm not fond of Qualcomm either. Their soc in the HP Touchpad was garbage, 

Those are fighting words sir. that chips worked quite well for its day and is still serving as the heart of my mothers tablet (It also overclocks to high hell(is it still overclocking if you push it to its rated clock up from what  HP downclocked it too?))

 

It was really bug in the OS that made that chip feel slow and switching to android cleared that up.

[LAwLz]

Qualcomm tried to play catch up to nVidia when the Tegra 3 was released so that they would also have a quad core. Having a quad core means higher theoretical performance at the expense of lower real world performance because you are dedicating more of your resources to the extra cores, which is remedied by increasing the clock speed. However, we live in the real world where single threaded performance is king, especially in mobile smartphones where new apps are easier to be coded for 1 fast core rather than 4 slow cores. nVidia acknowledged this when they made the dual core version of the K1 last year.

What the hell are you talking about? Having a quad core doesn't reduce performance by "dedicating more of your resources to the extra cores". I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about because it doesn't make any sense. That's like saying than the i3 will perform better than the i5 because it has 2 less cores.

Double the amount of cores doubles the theoretical peak performance. That's all it does. It doesn't decrease single threaded performance even 1%.

 

 

 

I'm not going to bother copying all the pictures over, but the "System" benchmark in Basemark is just the CPU tests, "Overall" is the one that includes gpu, cpu, memory, web, etc. As you can see the 805 of the Note 4 is tied with the A7 of the 5s in the cpu benchmark of "System", in the gpu benchmark, Apple's socs are pretty weak. I suppose web consists of how smooth and fast navigating websites are so it's no surprise iPhones do pretty well here considering how optimized safari is and how much of a difference IPC makes in that. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8613/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4-review/7

Don't bother posting web based benchmarks because they are completely irrelevant when talking about CPU performance. They mean absolutely nothing.

If the system benchmark is only the CPU then I have no idea what the hell BaseMark is doing because those results makes no sense. It shows the M8 getting its ass kicked by the E8 even though they have the same CPU and thermal environment.

They also contradict the (in my opinion far better) results from GeekBench, a benchmark which actually tells you what is being tested and not just "your CPU is 1459 good and for web it is 781 good".

 

No, you are completely wrong when you say the GPU in Apple's chips are weak. Where do you get all your misinformation from? Up until very recently they were always top of the time (usually by a huge margin) at release.

 

iPhone 4S - running circles around the competition.

iPhone 5 - The other manufacturers should have been ashamed to be so brutally outclassed.

iPhone 5S - Weak in some areas, great in some, overall top of the line. Qualcomm is really starting to focus on the GPU now.

iPhone 6 - Things have gotten a lot more even now. It still beats Qualcomm's solutions but not by a huge margin like before.

 

The iOS browser being very smooth has very little to do with the CPU by the way. It's the GPU that does the heavy lifting when it comes to scrolling, zooming and other things like that (which is what people usually refer to when they say a browser is smooth).

[Mew]

What the hell are you talking about? Having a quad core doesn't reduce performance by "dedicating more of your resources to the extra cores". I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about because it doesn't make any sense. That's like saying than the i3 will perform better than the i5 because it has 2 less cores.

Double the amount of cores doubles the theoretical peak performance. That's all it does. It doesn't decrease single threaded performance even 1%.

 

 

The i3 and i5 comparison is flawed because in mobile chips, tdp is very important, whereas your comparison of a desktop i3 (at a lower tdp) and a desktop i5 (at a higher tdp) is flawed. However, comparing the i3 to an FX 4x00 would make more sense because of the different architectures and the similarity of that to the mobile space. AMD, and by extension Qualcomm here, could have made the FX a faster dual core to compete with the i3 while keeping the same tdp and power consumption or they could just clock it a little lower than the theoretical 2 core and add 2 extra cores for higher theoretical performance. That is what Qualcomm did with all those quad cores.

 

Don't bother posting web based benchmarks because they are completely irrelevant when talking about CPU performance. They mean absolutely nothing.

If the system benchmark is only the CPU then I have no idea what the hell BaseMark is doing because those results makes no sense. It shows the M8 getting its ass kicked by the E8 even though they have the same CPU and thermal environment.

They also contradict the (in my opinion far better) results from GeekBench, a benchmark which actually tells you what is being tested and not just "your CPU is 1459 good and for web it is 781 good".

 

 

 

Benchmarks are benchmarks, they tell you the theoretical performance of a certain product at a certain theoretical task. GeekBench is no different. I remember not so long ago when people were touting that the Nexus 9 was just as powerful as the Mac Pro because of a single GeekBench result...

 

No, you are completely wrong when you say the GPU in Apple's chips are weak. Where do you get all your misinformation from? Up until very recently they were always top of the time (usually by a huge margin) at release.

 

iPhone 4S - running circles around the competition.

iPhone 5 - The other manufacturers should have been ashamed to be so brutally outclassed.

iPhone 5S - Weak in some areas, great in some, overall top of the line. Qualcomm is really starting to focus on the GPU now.

iPhone 6 - Things have gotten a lot more even now. It still beats Qualcomm's solutions but not by a huge margin like before.

 

 

IMO, the 4s' competition was the S3, the 5's is the S4, the 5s' is the S5, and the 6's is the S6. Which, as evident by 3DMark, shows that the iPhone's gpu performance isn't quite as strong as its competitors if they are tested off screen (theoretical). Hmm, the iPhones actually do pretty well in non physics heavy graphics benchmarks. I guess you're right; I just need to look at the correct benchmarks.

 

 

The iOS browser being very smooth has very little to do with the CPU by the way. It's the GPU that does the heavy lifting when it comes to scrolling, zooming and other things like that (which is what people usually refer to when they say a browser is smooth).

 

 

Safari is not only smooth, but also very fast. I guess the reason for its performance is because it is able to leverage both its fast cpu and gpu very well.

[LAwLz]

The i3 and i5 comparison is flawed because in mobile chips, tdp is very important, whereas your comparison of a desktop i3 (at a lower tdp) and a desktop i5 (at a higher tdp) is flawed. However, comparing the i3 to an FX 4x00 would make more sense because of the different architectures and the similarity of that to the mobile space. AMD, and by extension Qualcomm here, could have made the FX a faster dual core to compete with the i3 while keeping the same tdp and power consumption or they could just clock it a little lower than the theoretical 2 core and add 2 extra cores for higher theoretical performance. That is what Qualcomm did with all those quad cores.

So what you are saying is that if Qualcomm dropped two cores they could push the frequency even further while still maintaining the same TDP and power consumption? Do I understand you correctly? The problem with that is that you aren't taking power gating cores (which is active like 95% of the time on phones) into consideration. You can't just push frequencies up however you want as long as you stay within the TDP either. You're not taking into consideration that the voltage and frequency ratio is not linear, so you end up having to increase the voltage in bigger and bigger steps when you increase the frequency (which wastes power and generates a lot of heat).

You're also not taking into consideration that it's simply harder to increase per core performance than to increase the number of cores (at least when moving from 2 to 4).

 

So no, it's not as simple as just removing two cores and all of a sudden you got the option to increase per core performance. There are a ton of variables other than TDP and heat to take into consideration.

Qualcomm are trying their best to make their SoCs as good as possible.

 

 

Benchmarks are benchmarks, they tell you the theoretical performance of a certain product at a certain theoretical task. GeekBench is no different. I remember not so long ago when people were touting that the Nexus 9 was just as powerful as the Mac Pro because of a single GeekBench result...

Benchmarks don't tell you the theoretical performance. Theoretical is when there are no practical tests being done, and a benchmark is a practical test.

What's your point with that anyway? First you post and link me to a bunch of benchmarks then when I criticize them you tell me they aren't important anyway.

 

 

IMO, the 4s' competition was the S3, the 5's is the S4, the 5s' is the S5, and the 6's is the S6. Which, as evident by 3DMark, shows that the iPhone's gpu performance isn't quite as strong as its competitors if they are tested off screen (theoretical). Hmm, the iPhones actually do pretty well in non physics heavy graphics benchmarks. I guess you're right; I just need to look at the correct benchmarks.

So you are comparing Apple's current products vs products not even on the market yet... How about comparing what's on the market when the iPhone is released instead? Like I said before, at launch, the iPhone have always had an amazing GPU compared to the competitors. Of course it won't be as impressive if you compare it to something that's half a year newer.

Sometimes it have had areas where it's weak but it have also had areas where they just blow the competition away. You have to evaluate a product using multiple benchmarks (assuming there is more than 1 good one out).

 

 

Safari is not only smooth, but also very fast. I guess the reason for its performance is because it is able to leverage both its fast cpu and gpu very well.

My biggest issue with Safari (or web browsing on iOS in general) is that it's so quick to expunge things saved in the cache. I haven't used the iPad Air 2 yet but hopefully the extra RAM have allowed Apple to make it less aggressive at deleting things.

[mr moose]

Yeah it will probably be like the Note 4. Aluminum on the sides, plastic on the back. Personally I really like that approach. It doesn't complicate antenna tuning and it allows for all the benefits of a plastic back (like wireless charging and removable back).

 

It's just a shame plastic have gotten such a bad rep. People just feel something with their hands and then go "this feels cheap so therefore it must be bad". You can't judge qualities like strength and durability by just touching something.

 

 

 

 

My HTC desire from 2009, Aluminium surround and sides, plastic back.  The design was so good it got a the telstra blue tick for rural performance, Not bad for a smart phone. 

I too think this is the best approach.

[Mew]

So what you are saying is that if Qualcomm dropped two cores they could push the frequency even further while still maintaining the same TDP and power consumption? Do I understand you correctly? The problem with that is that you aren't taking power gating cores (which is active like 95% of the time on phones) into consideration. You can't just push frequencies up however you want as long as you stay within the TDP either. You're not taking into consideration that the voltage and frequency ratio is not linear, so you end up having to increase the voltage in bigger and bigger steps when you increase the frequency (which wastes power and generates a lot of heat).

You're also not taking into consideration that it's simply harder to increase per core performance than to increase the number of cores (at least when moving from 2 to 4).

 

So no, it's not as simple as just removing two cores and all of a sudden you got the option to increase per core performance. There are a ton of variables other than TDP and heat to take into consideration.

Qualcomm are trying their best to make their SoCs as good as possible.

 

 

Benchmarks don't tell you the theoretical performance. Theoretical is when there are no practical tests being done, and a benchmark is a practical test.

What's your point with that anyway? First you post and link me to a bunch of benchmarks then when I criticize them you tell me they aren't important anyway.

 

 

So you are comparing Apple's current products vs products not even on the market yet... How about comparing what's on the market when the iPhone is released instead? Like I said before, at launch, the iPhone have always had an amazing GPU compared to the competitors. Of course it won't be as impressive if you compare it to something that's half a year newer.

Sometimes it have had areas where it's weak but it have also had areas where they just blow the competition away. You have to evaluate a product using multiple benchmarks (assuming there is more than 1 good one out).

 

 

My biggest issue with Safari (or web browsing on iOS in general) is that it's so quick to expunge things saved in the cache. I haven't used the iPad Air 2 yet but hopefully the extra RAM have allowed Apple to make it less aggressive at deleting things.

 

Don't want to keep arguing so I'm just gonna make this brief. Powergating is good and all, but without a turbo feature, qualcomm is not taking advantage of the available tdp from turning off those cores. Sure voltage increases with clock speed, but as long as power consumption is in check and temperatures, both of which contribute to the total tdp, it's fine.

 

Apple, just like Intel, nVidia, and AMD release products that are intended to compete with the newest product their competitor is going to release, i.e. GTX 980 is released to compete against the upcoming R9 390x.