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  • jjj - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Do note that the 10nm over 14nm claimed numbers are vs 14LPE not LPP..
  • witeken - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Those performance and power numbers are completely meaningless anyway since no one ever mentions what was *actually* measured in the lab (at least not in the marketing foils).
  • witeken - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    So for example if it is 27% faster at 0.6V, then that would be completely irrelevant because that says nothing about the behavior at 2.4+GHz.
  • lilmoe - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    They're not meaningless when you compare a node shrink from the same fab. All you need to know is that Samsung 10nm LPE is in fact smaller and more dense than Samsung 14 LPP (or as op mentions, 14nm LPE).
  • Jumangi - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Another 800 series chip. So a mediocre bump in speed and battery life(maybe). Qualcomm has become the Intel of non Apple devices so they can get away with minimal updates and sell millions more chips cause no one else competes.
  • jordanclock - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    What do you mean "another 800 series chip? The 800-series is a performance category, not a model. The Snapdragon 800 is as different from the 820 as an Intel Core 2 is different from a Core i-series.
  • Meteor2 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    That I did not know. Thanks!
  • Prod1702 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I am sure what he is talking about is that there is no one out there other then Qualcomm making good high end chips. Intel and AMD is the same. AMD can not put anything out at the same level as Intel.
  • fanofanand - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Check back in six months, AMD looks to have a decent chip in Zen
  • eldakka - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I'll take another look zen.

    And if all goes well, zen we might have some competition back in the x86 space.
  • lilmoe - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    No one else competes? Hmmmm... I'd really like to see the total number of shipped devices with Snapdragon 820/821 vs Exynos 8890. As far as I can tell, Exynos is kicking butt on the same process node. Some even say that Samsung has been holding back the real performance of their chips BECAUSE there's no one competing for a while.

    What's more interesting is the new, yet to be announced, Exynos 8895 (or Exynos 9) on the same process nodes, and how the new Snapdragon competes in terms of performance, battery life, and more importantly, on-board co-processors and encoders/decoders.
  • Demi9OD - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I'd love an Exynos powered device without the bootloader/root restrictions of Samsung. Oh well, probably never happen. Running an HTC 10 now and if they are still around in two years, probably go with an HTC 12.
  • lilmoe - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    What bootloader/root restrictions? If you mean Knox, then that has nothing to do with the SoC.

    That being said, Knox is a good thing for users, especially for security.
  • arayoflight - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    You can root the exynos S7. Also the bootloader can be unlocked.
  • Demi9OD - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Are there any good ROMs without Touchwiz? Does the camera quality suffer when you load them?
  • arayoflight - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    If you mean AOSP based ROMs, no. But you can get Xposed, root, and detoxed versions of touchwiz, along with custom kernel support.

    Since the ROMs are based on touchwiz, the camera quality doesn't suffer at all.

    It's not as much of a freedom you get with a nexus phone or a Oneplus, but it's still better than most other phones, and certainly adequate except for the most demanding of flashers.
  • WorldWithoutMadness - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Don't worry, as Google is selling Pixel with that kind of price, Google might jump into the chip bandwagon as well.
  • Impulses - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    That's a pretty big leap, they've got a ton of work to do on logistics and just being able to actually sell the darn thing before they can start thinking about designing major internal components.
  • Meteor2 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I don't think that's the case at all. Apart from Exynos there's also Kirin. I'm sure the 960 will acquit itself well; the 950 did, especially in the all-important (for mobile) performance/power ratio.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/10766/huawei-announc...
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Yup.
    Samsung fanfolks love to talk up Sammy's design prowess but what we've seen is that bog standard arm cores are the fastest (per clock) and most energy efficient mobile core that android can use. My feeling regarding mongoose is that its inefficiency is roughly in proportion to the amount that Sammy fiddled with the design.
    Of course Qualcomm looks even worse considering their long expertise on this area and CONSISTENTLY falling just a bit short of the reference arm cores (again, per clock). In this last round, however, the a72 made Qualcomm look particularly bad.
    All that said, software has played a major role in all of this.
    Checkout out the following article, well, unless you subscribe (which I HIGHLY recommend you do if you've an interest in Linux, operating system design or open source software), it'll have to be next week, this article goes into some depth regarding the changes that were made to the Pixel phone (and aosp in general) to make it both more responsive and use less power hungry (the real kicker is that the Pixel is STILL using the old scheduler infrastructure, so, when they move to upstream's unified scheduler you should see more improvement yet).

    https://lwn.net/Articles/706374/
  • lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    "but what we've seen is that bog standard arm cores are the fastest (per clock) and most energy efficient mobile core that android can use"

    Easy there cowboy. Don't take this as a personal insult, but you (and lots of others in comment sections, and authors of many blogs, sadly), are what's wrong with this community.

    "My feeling regarding mongoose"
    How many do you believe care about your gut feeling? What matters is facts, numbers and real life scenarios. Not your (and others') personal hate relationship with Samsung.

    The Linux community is pissed at Sammy because they don't release sources and drivers. I hope they would, but oh well.

    "the a72 made Qualcomm look particularly bad"
    Huh? Didn't Qualcomm look particularly bad when they DID use ARM reference designs? SD 810 anyone? What Qualcomm "didn't know" at the time (which Sammy "did") is that you need to FIX ARM reference designs AND fix Android before you release an ARM reference design chip, either by software or brute force (process node).

    Objectively speaking, ARM's reference designs have had many flaws (Exynos 5410, SD 810, lots of Tegras, etc...), only fixed by Samsung's custom designs (that being custom cores, fabric, or inter-connects), and lately mitigated by ARM itself on Chinese silicon. I won't give ARM a pass because they JUST recently fixed their issues. You shouldn't either.

    Kirin (and Helio) SoCs don't compete in the same segment because they've always lacked in key areas, the most prominent being the GPU. When you have such a small GPU, then OF COURSE you'll have more thermal headroom for the CPU. That CPU-first design, (which relatively bodes well with Android's rendering inefficiencies), falls short in lots of key aspects. That being said, even with these "handicaps" (combined with quite larger batteries, lower resolution displays, and more *physical* thermal headroom due to larger, less feature dense phones), Exynos powered devices have always reigned supreme "overall". Samsung has just as much access, if not more, to ARM reference designs, just like they do with IT's PowerVR.

    It's EXTREMELY difficult to have fast CPUs AND GPUs both pushing lots of compute in mobile. Even Apple caps the CPU when you're running an intense 3D game (proof being their physics scores in games); but you can't do that on Android because 1) it isn't as efficient, and 2) do they have the same control over hardware and software like Apple.

    Unlike Chinese manufacturers, Samsung and Qualcomm have to deal with a LOT of pro-Apple media and individuals, (such as yourself), or former ones, who have no idea how Apple designs work (nor-what bodes better with Android vs iOS). They have to load their SoCs PACKED with features that Android can never use, unless they customize the crap out of it. Their devices have to have double the screen resolution (at least) to "compete". But then again, people like you call them out because they're not using "pure" Android. Try powering a 1440p screen on these Kirin processors. Yea, they'll fall flat on their face. Try comparing photos and videos processed by a Kirin processor with those processed by Exynos... yea....

    "[performance] per clock"
    Pfft. What matters in mobile is performance PER WATT, and efficiency in *average* workloads. Would love to see all those SoCs compared on a common real-life-scenario workload, and Apple's SoCs thrown in the mix for the heck of it (though non-indicative). Oh wait, Anandtech dropped that featured article............. darn it...

    You can't tout "benchmarks", then quickly retract when these benchmarks don't present data that back your petty arguments. You shouldn't constantly look around the web for blogposts and other BS articles to support your claims. Just stop. Look at things more objectively and put your bias aside.

    Geekbench (the benchmark you personally tout all the time) was never a legitimate "cross platform" benchmark, but its numbers are digestible when comparing CPUs on the same platform (Android). Same goes with browser benchmarks. Go to their website and tell me which is the fastest ANDROID smartphone SoC in BOTH single and multi-threaded performance in their latest Geekbench 4 benchmark.

    here's link:
    https://browser.primatelabs.com/android-benchmarks

    You keep replying to my comments on many threads and asking me for sources to back my arguments. Are you really interested in the truth or any form of objective facts? I'm pissed because I NO ONE wants to write a decent article objectively. I'm pissed because Anandtech that's not how the "business" works.
  • lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    "I'm pissed because I NO ONE wants to write a decent article objectively. I'm pissed because Anandtech that's not how the "business" works"

    *** correction:
    I'm pissed because no one wants to write a decent article objectively. I'm pissed because that's not how the business works, even for Anandtech.
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Not sure what warrants your rant here. The A72 is both higher IPC than Kryo and lower power. A72 is about equal IPC to Mongoose but at like 50% more power thus equally less efficient at peak perf.

    Kirin does not have higher CPU headroom because they have a smaller GPU, in fact it's the opposite, they have the smallest CPU headroom out of all vendors.

    And quit the nonsense about GB4 not being a legitimate cross-platform benchmark, it's like saying SPEC cross-platform is illegitimate because technically there's exactly 0 differences between the two in terms on how things are being ported.
  • lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    "Not sure what warrants your rant here".

    I don't know. Misinformation, inconsistency, lack of data, lack of valid comparisons. You name it. Back when I argued that higher trees screens were bad for performance and battery life, you all blew in my face. Now you're trying to tell my that geekbench is legit when they even admitted that and ""
  • lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Hit submit by mistake.

    And "updated their datasets" to match the workload for all platforms in the latest version. We should all accept this as true now? Can you check and test that ported code?

    Would you also be kind to check on the compiler optimizations?

    "in fact it's the opposite, they have the smallest CPU headroom out of all vendors"
    Do elaborate on this please. I'm very interested to see just HOW a smaller GPU wouldn't give the cpu more power and thermal headroom to work with one a limited 2-4 watt chip.
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    GB4 info is publicly available in the white sheet.

    It's in the Mate 8 review. The 950's CPU TDP is much less than say the 8890's even though the latter has double the GPU perf. Just having a smaller GPU doesn't magically allow the CPU to clock higher and use more power. And having a bigger GPU doesn't limit it either, you just limit the CPU to a lower frequency in those scenarios.
  • tuxRoller - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    Just wanted you to know I read this and nodded right along.
    I'm not sure how you are determining some of these things, and I certainly don't see how that first paragraph can be read as not being a personal insult, but I'll respond to this, but I want to do so quite carefully.
    Btw, I'm not sure what point you are trying to address with that GB link. Maybe you have me confused with someone else? I have serious issues with any closed source benchmark, as should any serious hardware site with an interest in comparative performance. However, it's one of the better, native, cross platform tests we have that is also widely used and not gpu focused.
    Nearly as good though, imho, are the JavaScript tests as long as you compile the browser (from the same commit number) for each device. This won't be cross-platform, however.
  • skavi - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    /r/FuckQualcomm
  • watzupken - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Makes me wonder how they come up with the naming convention. Its been 800, 810, 820, then all of a sudden you get an 835... I know there are 805, but those are typically mid cycle refresh, i.e. clockspeed bumps.
  • Meteor2 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I think random model numbers is an eastern Asia thing, e.g. incomprehensible TV model numbers.
  • lilmoe - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Qualcomm is eastern Asian? Good to know.
    On another note, Intel's naming convention says wussup.
  • Meteor2 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I meant that they're appealing to the China/Japan/Korea market.
  • WPX00 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    As of late they've avoided using xx0 numbers, and xx5 models appear to be all octa-core chips. Which probably means the 835 is an octa-core chip. The jump from 82x to 83x represents the 10nm shrink, and the move from 0 to 5 represents the move from quad-core to octa-core.
  • Drumsticks - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I don't think that makes sense; the Snapdragon 810 is also an octa-core, and the Snapdragon 805 was a quad-core.
  • fanofanand - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    And the 808 was a hexacore.
  • WPX00 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    The word "typically" matters here. It's all speculation at the moment.
  • frostyfiredude - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Taking a quick look at the snapdragons, its basically random. Lots of XX0 octal core chips and lots of XX5 quads. Then there are the XX2, XX3, XX6 and XX7 sprinkled randomly. And the X5X series stuck in there randomly cuz big numbers are great.
  • SirPerro - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I'm quite more optimistic than that

    800 to 801 was a small upgrade
    800 to 805 was a meh upgrade
    805 to 810 was a meh upgrade
    810 to 820 was a meh upgrade
    820 to 821 was a tiny upgrade
    82x to 835 must be YUUUUUGE
  • rocketbuddha - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    810 to 820 was a big upgrade "architecture wise".

    810 was the first 64 bit high end core from QCOM. It was caught pants down when Apple "Swift" became the first 64 bit ARM ISA Custom core implementation. So they rushed the 810 which was nothing but a standard ARM design of 4xA57+4xA53 with Adreno Graphics and QCM radios at 20nm TSMC.

    820 was a custom 4x Kyro core based SOC where QCOM replaced the big little ARM with its own custom cores. It was in addition done in Samsung 14nm FinFET node.
    821 is basically a faster version of 820 with a improvement in the modem section to handle higher LTE upload/download.

    What we do not know is whether 835 will use a Custom Kyro successor or the ARM A72/A53 based combination. I am leaning towards the latter as it were the former we would have heard it (boasting) by now.
  • fanofanand - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Qualcomm makes their own for a reason, they didn't with 810 because like you said they simply were caught off guard. I don't think Qualcomm will use stock ARM cores unless it has to, that's how they make their money is through differentiation.
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    They don't need to differentiate with the cpus, however. They've got a very good gpu (though it appears their video decoders could use some work), excellent dsps, a very, very good audio codec and amp combo (I believe it's called aqstic), a class leading dsp (with good tooling), and the best modems.
    That's ALL value added hardware that only they can provide. Dropping the best-in-androidland arm ref cores into their designs (not as easy as that, obviously, but far cheaper than designing your own and, given their track record, it seems like it would behoove them to consider not always going with their own designs) would be pretty awesome, I believe.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    @tuxRoller: "They've got a very good gpu (though it appears their video decoders could use some work), excellent dsps, a very, very good audio codec and amp combo (I believe it's called aqstic), a class leading dsp (with good tooling), and the best modems."

    Agreed on all points here. It's amazing that Qualcomm gets so many design wins, yet so many people miss so much of the value equation.

    @tuxRoller: "Dropping the best-in-androidland arm ref cores into their designs (not as easy as that, obviously, but far cheaper than designing your own and, given their track record, it seems like it would behoove them to consider not always going with their own designs) would be pretty awesome, I believe."

    I have some experience in designing silicon chips, though I'm nowhere near the expert companies like Qualcomm employ. In my mind, the verdict is still out on who has the "best-in-androidland" cores (more on that in a minute). You are correct, it isn't as easy as it sounds to just drop in a ref core. You are also correct that it is still cheaper than designing your own in-house. However, benefits of designing your own go beyond just CPU performance or efficiency. Maintaining control over the design allows for many integration benefits. All the value adds you mention above have to connect somehow and maintaining more control over the core can provide latency, efficiency, and/or even thermal distribution benefits. Contrary to your statement, I do believe that they are in fact constantly considering the reference core designs. The Cortex A7, A53, and A72 are currently in heavy use in the 200, 400/600, and 600 series designs respectively.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qualcomm_Sna...

    It is in fact their given track record (Think 808/810) that keeps them designing their own cores for their most premium devices. Given the drawbacks they had with A57 that neither they (with their own Krait designs) nor other manufacturers were experiencing, it is not hard to imagine that the problem lies outside of the core itself. This remained true even after revisions were made to the designs, so I can't just write it off as the result of a rushed design. I suspect that they had trouble with the integration of the cores with their IP, rather than the core itself. In other words, it is quite possible that, paired with a lesser (or at least different) set of IP and optimized for such integration, the Kryo design could be higher performing or more efficient than the reference counterparts. In the end, we can't really know, but we can be sure that Qualcomm sees some value in continuing to design their own cores and I am perfectly willing to trade off a little performance for some of the value adds you mention above.
  • rocketbuddha - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    I think the 810 had the worst of 2 worlds

    Cortex A57 is a not as good as they expected. So ARM hurried up got A72 to replace it. But A53 still remains the little core for gens of big core.

    TSMC 20nm process was also problematic. SMSG made its A57 in its 14nm FinFET and was able to better QCOM. Also I remember this graphic from Andrei here
    http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9762/P1030606.jpg...
    142.5% power over a unit area.
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, November 24, 2016 - link

    Crap! Sorry, I didn't see this response.
    I'm glad you pointed out their use of the ref cores, but, I've one thing to add: excepting their Wear line of socs, and assuming they have a competing custom core, they tend to gimp the ref arm cores in some way (process node, frequency, gpu).
    With regards to 808/810, I don't think they did that bad of a job relative to the competition (additionally, their kryo core, even with a freq advantage, doesn't always outperform the a57s... something Samsung doesn't seem to have to worry about with their m1). Their 808, in particular, was quite respectable, and had it been clocked higher, and given the adreno 430, they would've had a rather nice design. In fact, iirc, arm suggested that the the a57 be paired with the a53 in a 1:2 ratio.
    However, that's besides the point. Qualcomm has shown, as you pointed out, that it has proficiency with integrating arm ref cores with their own ip. Now, unless we are to assume there is something special about their high-end socs (aside from component performance) that makes integration particularly difficult I'd assume that the previous generation was due to relatively poor integration (recall, the first exynos that used the a57 had pretty serious issues, as reported by this site).
  • rocketbuddha - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    QCOM has to justify its cores as they are ISA implementor and it takes more time to produce one but the advantages of a good design will give it a leg up competiton. When I looked at some investor presentations of QCOM long back before they became a top-dog, they would constantly justify as to why they went with the custom ARM model. So if the 835 was a custom core, I expect them to definitely boasting it as it is another justification to their Investors and Shareholders.

    Even in the current set of products except for the top dog 820 everything else seems to be standard ARM core..... I have not seen anyother time that their custom core justification is more wanting.
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, November 24, 2016 - link

    The thing is (iirc), their cores, going back to the first snapdragon, usually have lower IPC. To be competitive, they had to clock them higher, but even then they tended to be running against the wind when it comes to efficiency.
    I need to pull up some of those old reviews to verify this thought...
  • systemBuilder - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link

    Qualcomm makes their own ARM cores but they don't really give a shit about whether they work or benchmark too well. The company is run by-and-for the enjoyment of the wireless systems engineers. CPU design is just a sideshow for them.
  • tuxRoller - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link

    Um...sure thing;)
    That obviously explains why all of the other arm isa licensees have been producing much better designs over the years...
    ARM has tremendously good engineers. As good as exist in the business especially considering their relatively small amount of resources.
    They develop entire platforms excluding batteries, screens, modems, camera sensors and touch sensors (all of which have a number of other vendors that will offer you their wares).
  • tuxRoller - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link

    One more thing: if you're only comparing them to Apple you need to realize that they aren't playing in the same box. Apple build massive, expensive cores while arm, thus far, leans towards the best perf they can get for, roughly, a constant purchasing unit (which things tilted differently depending on the exact core line they are working on).
  • fanofanand - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    I have read about an 830 that is supposedly going to be in devices at the end of this year so I think the 835 is just a smaller node version of the 830 though I am just speculating.
  • name99 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    That would be my guess.
    830 is planned, then Samsung is willing to promise 10nm faster than expected (or 830 delayed longer than expected) so a quick rearrangement gives an 835 as 830 recompiled down to 10nm.

    As for improvements, people can sneer that there's "nothing new" (and as an Apple fan, I'll be the first to sneer at anyone else's CPU...) but there's more to a SoC than just the CPU. At the very least they've probably stuffed in more GPU transistors, so better performance there; likewise probably a better ISP (faster HDR, perhaps various image fusion from two camera lenses); more of their on-going neural-network/AI stuff (which will take software to surface, but may lead to things like better speech recognition?), probably video support for larger size (I don't know where they're at now, but if they can handle 4K@30p it'll go up to 4K@60p, etc).

    It is ALWAYS the case (and the Internet, being a hyperactive three year ALWAYS forgets) that, yes, if you have last year's phone, this year's phone does not look THAT special (and same for phone SoCs). Guess what, new phones are not AIMED at you, they're meant to be a good upgrade to people with two year old phones, and a great upgrade for three year old phones...
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Going by their history I'd say we won't get a new dsp (I suppose it's possible, but the 680 is a brand new design and it can already handle the de-parallaxed image processing tasks from two sensors---they might up the frequency a bit, however, but I don't know how much wiggle room they have with this arch).
    I think adreno is actually a possible candidate for a redesign as the 5xx didn't differ greatly from the 4xx, iirc.
    As we know they are updating their quick charge to v4 ("5MIN GIVES YOU 5HOURS!!!!!"), which will be used by someone, probably.
    Their memory controller is ripe for an update, imho, simply because of their "upcoming" arm server core offering. As it now stands, their memory controller is great at one thing: media-like workloads. In fact, I wonder how much they are holding back their cores with that design choice....
    Perhaps support for lpddr4x? Is that even available yet?
    Aside from the cpu (which, again, history suggests will be a refinement of kryo rather than something wholly new) I'm going with the gpu as the component most likely to change. Yeah, is love to see with done on the mmu but my pessimism is telling me "NO!".
  • lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    The 830 was also rumored to be built on 10nm... I don't believe the "5" in the model number is indicative of a process shrink.
  • lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    That's anyone's guess. The 800 and 805 were on the same process node. Rumor has it that Samsung has co-designed the 835 with Qualcomm. The 830 probably had some particular shortcomings, was dropped entirely, and replaced with the 835 due to Samsung's involvement.
    Who knows...
  • systemBuilder - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link

    You forgot the Snapdragon 822, so very, very different from the 820, that they added a +2.
  • Ironchef3500 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Wish I could get excited. Just havent been really impressed since the 800,801 days. Dont know what the deal is....
  • darkich - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    My sentiments also.
    The SD 800 was one of the best SoC's ever, and neither one of its successors came close to living up to that.
  • Azurael - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Meh, wonder whether they've got per-core performance back on par with the stock Arm IP?

    It would have been interesting to see how SD810 would have worked ported to 14nm. I have a distinct feeling it might have been faster than the Kryo-based SD820 that got released, even without replacing the A57s with A72/3 IP.
  • Moizy - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Hmm, interesting, would have been interesting to compare 810 to 820 on the same node. However, wasn't the A57-based Exynos in the Galaxy S6/Note 5 (forget the chip numbering) based on a 14nm process (not sure which step)? That chip, apart from the GPU, was essentially an 810 on 14nm, right?
  • Moizy - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Each 8xx series chip has a lot of hope and hype, but then it always fails to match whatever Ax chip in the newest iPhone from 6 months before, especially on compute. I'm an Android guy, not an Apple fan, but I just hope the Kirin or Exynos chips can proliferate, and that Google can internally develop their own custom core that can outperform this. Alas, I'm sure most every Android flagship next year will have this chip, but it will probably not equal A73-based SoCs, Samsung's custom core, and the A10. I want that performance in a good Android device.
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link

    Well, I'm not sure this is true.
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-re...

    It wasn't until their first 64bit arch that they really took the unambiguous lead. That they've been able to maintain (increase?) their advantage over the years indicates how focused, and talented, their team is.
  • sseemaku - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Its difficult to understand Qualcomm's naming. We had SD800, 810, 820 and now directly 835? Next they will release 840, 860 to imply bigger performance gains!
  • zodiacfml - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    Looks like there's going to be a slower version, an 830. First batch seems to be going expensive and rare considering that number 5.
  • zodiacfml - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link

    First half of 2017 is pretty vague. It means that is not the first quarter. Either we don't see the Samsung S8 with this chip on March or it will be delayed, I reckon, in May.
  • chipped - Saturday, November 19, 2016 - link

    Only problem I've noticed with Snapdragon chips is that they always have thermal problems, they only be run in 5+ inch phones without throttling. Whereas a chip like the Apple A9 can be put into a 4 inch phone like the iPhone SE without being throttled or limited in anyway.

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