Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Specs Announced

DocSwag · December 7, 2017

6 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Seems like a pretty substantial upgrade.

25% higher big CPU performance.

15% higher LITTLE CPU performance.

30% higher GPU performance at the same power consumption.

3 times higher DSP performance.

New modem.

HDR10 video recording.

4K 60 FPS recording.

Higher efficiency from the 10LPP process.

It's not a small upgrade, for sure, but I personally don't see it as a big one either. It's not like the upgrades we've seen Apple make with the A6 and A7 or even the jumps Qualcomm has done in the past with stuff like the snapdragon 800.

As for gpu performance, we've definitely seen much larger jumps before. The 820 was between 50-100% faster than the 810 depending on how much the 810 was throttling and back in the day the snapdragon 800 was giving close to double the performance of any previous SoC gpu.

It also looks to me the efficiency has been cashed in towards higher clock speeds on the performance cores so that's not a big point imo.

Looking at a pure performance upgrade I personally don't see the 845 as a revolutionary upgrade over the 835, just a "decent" one.

Trixanity · December 7, 2017

36 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Yeah I know. I actually meant it as would be great that other phones adopt it too. It's pretty neat.

That's actually up to Sony to do that. They only put them on their "top" sensor. I only see three reasons others wouldn't use them: Sony keeps them exclusive, Sony prices them too high or they just can't take good enough photos. I'm leaning towards a combination of the latter two.

Could embedded DRAM trickle down to other sensors? Perhaps. I'm not sure. I think it requires a fairly large sensor and a fairly large physical footprint to work properly. That's what their IMX400 is at least. We know it's large and expensive. The yields might not be as good as other sensors but that's speculation. We know it has trouble taking a decent photo. That could just be all software but there is also something that indicates the lack of OIS reduces the image quality especially in low light. I don't think the camera module can fit OIS without creating a massive hump. When you use a tripod it improves a fair bit. OIS isn't just it though. Lense isn't too good nor is the small pixel size. We probably have a lot of issues compounding things into one very large problem. I don't think other OEMs want to touch that. So they stick to 12 MP sensors with a decent size and with larger pixels. Reduces complexity and it really helps overall photo and video performance.

Doobeedoo · December 7, 2017

3 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

That's actually up to Sony to do that. They only put them on their "top" sensor. I only see three reasons others wouldn't use them: Sony keeps them exclusive, Sony prices them too high or they just can't take good enough photos. I'm leaning towards a combination of the latter two.

Could embedded DRAM trickle down to other sensors? Perhaps. I'm not sure. I think it requires a fairly large sensor and a fairly large physical footprint to work properly. That's what their IMX400 is at least. We know it's large and expensive. The yields might not be as good as other sensors but that's speculation. We know it has trouble taking a decent photo. That could just be all software but there is also something that indicates the lack of OIS reduces the image quality especially in low light. I don't think the camera module can fit OIS without creating a massive hump. When you use a tripod it improves a fair bit. OIS isn't just it though. Lense isn't too good nor is the small pixel size. We probably have a lot of issues compounding things into one very large problem. I don't think other OEMs want to touch that. So they stick to 12 MP sensors with a decent size and with larger pixels. Reduces complexity and it really helps overall photo and video performance.

All valid points. Exclusivity is a one thing yes. Camera hump is lame to have that's for sure, though only so compact currently such cameras can be made. I remember Samsung is developing their own 1000fps sensor. Also I've read somewhere before that also they're designing new type of smartphone camera that won't require much depth as some do today, hence the humps. Will be interesting to see improvements with all this.