Announced today, the Snapdragon 821 offers a modest CPU frequency increase over the Snapdragon 820, with clock speeds of up to 2.4 GHz compared to 2.2 GHz with the Snapdragon 820. The new SoC is still implementing Qualcomm's custom quad-core "Kryo" design, which is made up of two pairs of dual-core CPU clusters.
Quoting Anandtech, who also reported on the Snapdragon 821 today:
"What isn’t in this announcement is that the power cluster will likely be above 2 GHz and GPU clocks look to be around 650 MHz but without knowing whether there are some changes other than clock relative to Adreno 530 we can’t really estimate the performance of this part."
Specifics on the Adreno GPU were not mentioned in the official announcement. The 650 MHz GPU clock reported by Anandtech would offer a modest improvement over the SD820's 624 MHz Adreno 530 GPU. Additionally, the "power cluster" will reportedly move from 1.6 GHz with the SD820 to 2.0 GHz with the SD821.
No telling when this updated SoC will find its way into consumer devices, with the Snapdragon 820 currently available in the Samsung Galaxy S7/S7 Edge, LG G5, OnePlus 3, and a few others.
The 650 MHz GPU clock
That should probably be improvement.
Yep. Fixed the typo.
Yep. Fixed the typo.
Is this SKU is going to have
Is this SKU is going to have the Hexagon 680 DSP IP on board? The Hexagon 680 DSP is going to be made available to application developers through the API, and there all some very intresting uses for some applications, and maybe some other HSA style useage for the Hexagon DSP IP.
Qualcomm Adreno 530
Qualcomm Adreno 530 GPU/Adreno GPU are going to have to compete against ARM Holding’s new Mali/Bifrost GPUs, as well as the PowerVR designs/Custom Apple PowerVR SKUs also. The Arm Holdings Mali/Bifrost GPU is a completely new design that has changed over from an instruction level parallelism focused Mali/Older design to the new Mali/Bifrost thread level parallelism focused GPU design, so Arm Holdings has taken a similar approach to what AMD did in going from AMD’s TeraScale to AMD’s GCN RISC designs. So that new Mali/Bifrost GPU micro-architecture is going to be very async-compute aware in its own way compered to the other mobile GPU designs.
So hopefully there will be some Mali/Bifrost design wins to compare with Qualcomm’s Adreno, and Imagination’s PowerVR. It looks like Imagination has got its first design win for its PowerVR/Wizard Ray tracing GPU IP/technology, but it is for some VR goggles design. I am still hoping that Apple will make use of Imagination’s PowerVR/ray tracing in the GPU hardware technology in a future tablet, but Imagination Technologies is in a bit of a business slump lately, good thing that they have the Apple business to fall back on.
‘two pairs of dual-core CPU
‘two pairs of dual-core CPU clusters’
So eight cores? Or did you mean a pair of dual-core CPU clusters?