Snapdragon's 821 is 10% faster than SD 820.

[kameshss]

Qualcomm has announced a new flagship mobile processor called the Snapdragon 821.

 

The 821 is a slight update to the Snapdragon 820 that debuted in smartphones earlier this year and promises modest performance gains.
 

 

On this year's flagship phones like S7 and S7 edge (not all of them), the HTC 10, the LG G5, the OnePlus 3, and the Xiaomi Mi5, Snapdragon 820 was the heart of their body. 

 

Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 821 builds upon the 820’s features, but provides a 10 percent performance increase. Its quad-core CPU runs at 2.4GHz. The company says it will debut in smartphones and other devices in the second half of this year. Perhaps we’ll see it first appear in the next Samsung Galaxy Note?

 

The 821 is about as exciting a refresh as its model number implies: its Kryo CPU cores will run at a maximum clock speed of 2.4GHz, a roughly 10 percent increase from the 2.15GHz cores in the Snapdragon 820. There's no word on whether the 821's two slower cores in the CPU will be faster than the 1.6GHz in the current chip. Qualcomm's press release doesn't mention the GPU's speed increasing, and it says specifically that the 821 will use the same 600Mbps Snapdragon X12 LTE modem as the 820.

 

To achieve the higher speeds, Qualcomm says it bumped the clock rates of the 14-nanometer chip from 2.1 to 2.4 GHz. Otherwise, it's borrowing the Snapdragon 820's tech, including the 600 Mbps X12 LTE modem, Ultra HD Voice tech for improved call quality, and Upload+ for faster downloads. At the same time, it'll deliver greater speeds, battery life and app performance.

 

ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe Said To Be The First Smartphone To Feature A Snapdragon 821 (Not sure about it, WCCFTECH source)

 

Qualcomm says "you can expect commercial devices powered by the 821 in the second half of 2016" with more information coming soon.

 

Source: arstechnica, The Verge, engadget.

[rattacko123]

"10% boost in clockspeeds" "better battery life"  seems legit

[Murasaki]

So basically 821 is an 820 OC

That's what got stuck in my head from reading anyway...

[kameshss]

2 minutes ago, ModuleLFS said:

So basically 821 is an 820 OC

That's what got stuck in my head from reading anyway...

It's like an 8350 oc'd to 4.7 GHz and have performance like 9590.

[Murasaki]

15 minutes ago, rattacko123 said:

"10% boost in clockspeeds" "better battery life"  seems legit

Don't worry, we can just increase the battery capacity by 10% and we'll be back to square 1.

[MrDynamicMan]

Lol. One of the least fascinating pieces of tech news in ages.

[VerticalDiscussions]

The mobile world, is starting to become a grudge to bear and learn about... yet alone own

[Suika]

1 hour ago, rattacko123 said:

"10% boost in clockspeeds" "better battery life"  seems legit

I'm assuming it's just a well binned chip, similar to the mobile GTX 980 offering the same performance at a lower TDP.

[NuclearPeace]

This is going to be destroyed by the Apple A10.

[LAwLz]

17 minutes ago, Suika said:

I'm assuming it's just a well binned chip, similar to the mobile GTX 980 offering the same performance at a lower TDP.

Yep

Might also be some minor tweaks to the design to get more efficiency. Kryo was/is Qualcomm's first 64bit as well as 14nm design so there is probably some room for improvements. Remember how many iterative improvements we got with Krait?

10% better performance (from the clock speed increase), and lower power usage (more mature manufacturing process allows for better binning, plus minor tweaks) is perfectly reasonable.

[Repost]

21 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Yep

Might also be some minor tweaks to the design to get more efficiency. Kryo was/is Qualcomm's first 64bit as well as 14nm design so there is probably some room for improvements. Remember how many iterative improvements we got with Krait?

10% better performance (from the clock speed increase), and lower power usage (more mature manufacturing process allows for better binning, plus minor tweaks) is perfectly reasonable.

It'll also be great if it could sustain the higher clock speed for longer periods of time compared to the 820. 

[Coaxialgamer]

3 hours ago, rattacko123 said:

"10% boost in clockspeeds" "better battery life"  seems legit

because of process maturity , they have enough high binned chips ( that consume less power ) to sell high clock versions . Think f it like haswell refresh , where the process was mature enough to allow binning a high amount of 4ghz+ processors

[Bouzoo]

3 hours ago, rattacko123 said:

"10% boost in clockspeeds" "better battery life"  seems legit

It's interesting, there were numerous reports on some phones that OCing the chips increased battery life. With higher clocks, the chips are able to do the task with lower loads and thus increase the battery time, or do the work faster and work at load in general less time. At least that's how in theory it should work. 

I've never tested it myself to be clear. 

[ChineseChef]

3 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

It's interesting, there were numerous reports on some phones that OCing the chips increased battery life. With higher clocks, the chips are able to do the task with lower loads and thus increase the battery time, or do the work faster and work at load in general less time. At least that's how in theory it should work. 

I've never tested it myself to be clear. 

Probably similar to how SSDs were getting much worse battery times on laptops when they first came out.  They were allowing the system to actually do more work, since it wasn't waiting for the HDD as much.  Perhaps this has a similar yet opposite effect, allowing the CPU to work harder, but for less time, causing a net increase in battery life/efficiency.

[Energycore]

7 hours ago, rattacko123 said:

"10% boost in clockspeeds" "better battery life"  seems legit

Sounds like a node shrink to me

[WereCat]

Is it at last close to Kirin 955? CPU wise.

[WereCat]

4 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

It's interesting, there were numerous reports on some phones that OCing the chips increased battery life. With higher clocks, the chips are able to do the task with lower loads and thus increase the battery time, or do the work faster and work at load in general less time. At least that's how in theory it should work. 

I've never tested it myself to be clear. 

Well. I never overclocked mobile CPU. In theory you don't have to OC it at all, just undervolt it.

[Devin92]

10 minutes ago, ChineseChef said:

Probably similar to how SSDs were getting much worse battery times on laptops when they first came out.  They were allowing the system to actually do more work, since it wasn't waiting for the HDD as much.  Perhaps this has a similar yet opposite effect, allowing the CPU to work harder, but for less time, causing a net increase in battery life/efficiency.

But, its consuming more power to OC a chip. So basically, you are saying the OC will have a better power/performance ratio than not OC, which I really doubt. If this is the case, the OEMs or Quadcom will do it to get a better chip at the first place. I bet theres slight tweaks to overcome the heat output and power consumption so the chip can finish the same task with same power required within less time, and result in a 10% battery life increase.

[Sauron]

I honestly don't see the point in any more performance at this point. Just focus on battery life and storage.

[ChineseChef]

24 minutes ago, Devin92 said:

But, its consuming more power to OC a chip. So basically, you are saying the OC will have a better power/performance ratio than not OC, which I really doubt. If this is the case, the OEMs or Quadcom will do it to get a better chip at the first place. I bet theres slight tweaks to overcome the heat output and power consumption so the chip can finish the same task with same power required within less time, and result in a 10% battery life increase.

It only consumes more power when running at the higher speed under load.  So, with modern CPUs being able to downclock themselves really well when not being used, it can do "high power" work in less time, then resume low power mode much quicker.  Though if your argument is that the efficiency per power while at speed doesn't make sense, I got nothing for that one.  My assumption was that overall power usage was more efficient due to being able to work harder for less time, so if you use 10% more power, but work for less time, you would see a lower power use overall.

[Devin92]

18 minutes ago, ChineseChef said:

It only consumes more power when running at the higher speed under load.  So, with modern CPUs being able to downclock themselves really well when not being used, it can do "high power" work in less time, then resume low power mode much quicker.  Though if your argument is that the efficiency per power while at speed doesn't make sense, I got nothing for that one.  My assumption was that overall power usage was more efficient due to being able to work harder for less time, so if you use 10% more power, but work for less time, you would see a lower power use overall.

OCing make the chip work harder for less time but consume more energy/unit time.

 

Say if it can finish 10% faster but consume only less than 10% energy/unit time, and in the end it finishes 10% faster with same (or less) energy, then, yes it will make sense the OCing chip will give much better battery life. BUT if this is the real case, the OEMs and Quaudcom will do it in the first place and wont call it a SD821, because y not? right?

 

I would guess the real case is SD820 OCing have a 10% boost in performance with a 15-20%（just a random number）, and as a result, even if it finish the job faster, it consumes way more energy in total to do it. And Quaudcom makes improvement in whatever place to make it reaches the situation I mentioned above (10% more performance and only less than 10% energy draw overall).

[bcredeur97]

and that is what you call.. bouncing off the limits of silicon wall

 

tech is going to advance quite slowly until we replace silicon with something else... quite unfortunate but it's what i've been predicting for the last couple of years.

 

better battery tech and multi-core optimizations would help a lot though 

[Repost]

7 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

It's interesting, there were numerous reports on some phones that OCing the chips increased battery life. With higher clocks, the chips are able to do the task with lower loads and thus increase the battery time, or do the work faster and work at load in general less time. At least that's how in theory it should work. 

I've never tested it myself to be clear. 

Also known as race to sleep. 

[Doobeedoo]

It's slight upgrade. 830 will be way more interesting. Also new Exynos for sure

[snowComet]

17 hours ago, kameshss said:

 

ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe Said To Be The First Smartphone To Feature A Snapdragon 821 (Not sure about it, WCCFTECH source)

 

It is true. Today (12/07) Asus held a press conference for Zenfone 3 in Taiwan, and the 821 was used in the Deluxe version 

https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/12/zenfone-3-deluxe-snapdragon-821/