Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 820 and Zeroth Platform
by Joshua Ho on March 2, 2015 3:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- SoCs
- MWC 2015
- Snapdragon 820
Today, Qualcomm is announcing the new Zeroth Platform, which is enabled by the Snapdragon 820 SoC.
While Qualcomm is avoiding any real disclosure of the SoC at this point, we do know that the Snapdragon 820 will be built on a FinFET process, which could be either TSMC’s 16nm or Samsung’s 14nm process. In addition to all of the improvements that the move to a new process brings, Qualcomm is finally introducing their custom ARMv8 CPU core, named Kryo. Unfortunately, there are no real details here either, but given that there’s only one architecture named it’s likely that Qualcomm is moving away from big.LITTLE with the Snapdragon 820.
The final detail regarding Snapdragon 820 is that it will begin sampling in the second half of 2015, which should mean that we can expect it to be in devices some time either at the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016. Ultimately, the fact that Qualcomm has come up with a custom ARMv8 CPU architecture in such a short time continues to show just how quickly Qualcomm can respond to changing market conditions, something that we first saw with the Snapdragon 810.
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Krysto - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Wow, that's astonishingly bad. Kryo is already arriving in 2016. Are you saying that if Apple didn't already announce Cyclone a year earlier before everyone else, Kryo wouldn't have arrived at least until 2017?What the hell, Qualcomm? This is why monopolies are bad. It seems Qualcomm intended to enjoy every little moment of its monopoly once it would reach that point. Thank god, it didn't work that way for them.
dragonsqrrl - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
I guess it depends on when they started work on Kryo. If it really did start around the same time as the introduction of Cyclone then that would be a very short time. Rumors floating around at the time pointed to Qualcomm scrapping their followup to Krait in response to Cyclone and the A7, which from what I heard would've still been an ARMv7 32-bit arch planned for a 2014 launch.jjj - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
"the fact that Qualcomm has come up with a custom ARMv8 CPU architecture in such a short time continues to show just how quickly Qualcomm can respond to changing market conditions, something that we first saw with the Snapdragon 810."LMAO you are acting like V8 came out of nowhere overnight.
You really need to revise your objectivity when it comes to Qualcomm, you keep praising them when there is nothing to praise.
In this cycle, if anything, Qualcomm has shown that they are vulnerable with their entire line lagging behind one competitor or another. The timing to mess up was no ideal either since it's right when others started pushing LTE and it might costs them significant market share.
Anyway, hopefully Kryo is fast , wouldn't mind something exciting in mobile and ,maybe server - i assume Kryo is the entry point in server for them.
Klug4Pres - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
"LMAO you are acting like V8 came out of nowhere overnight.You really need to revise your objectivity when it comes to Qualcomm, you keep praising them when there is nothing to praise."
Completely agtree. This is just embarrassing fluff from Anandtech - Qualcomm was caught napping, and has now fallen behind not just Apple but Samsung.
sonicmerlin - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
What is the advantage of a 64 bit chip? Who cares?hlovatt - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Why have Qualcomm fallen behind Samsung? They were both caught out by Apple equally, they both rushed through an off-the-shelf 64 bit, now Qualcomm are developing their own 64 bit, no word on Samsung's own 64 bit.name99 - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Samsung don't claim to be a CPU designer. They have an architecture license (I believe) but have never promised a design; so they can't be faulted for lack of timely delivery.Are you going to bitch about how long it takes MS to deliver an ARM chip? They ALSO have an architecture license you know (god knows what for...)
name99 - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
We have been through this a dozen fscking times. The value of ARMv8 consists in the new ISA which is designed for higher performance implementations without the constraints imposed by backward compatibility.Blassster - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Please be in the next Nexus :)TheJian - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
I'd rather have 14nm NV chip fabbed at samsung in the next nexus this xmas. I'd rather have NV drivers if I intend to game at all, which is my only purpose past training vids in bed/on the go...LOL.If they want to push forward in gaming, google needs to use NV at least in tablet or gaming devices. If you talking phone, ok maybe. But if NV gets a samsung modem usage out of the gpu IP suit, I'll still take NV in a phone then too. Samsung has cat11 too. NV certainly doesn't want to help qcom by using their modem (they make gpus, where samsung doesn't yet), so this will probably end up being part of some deal they make over the lawsuit (along with cheap fabbing for a while or something, or maybe samsung using NV gpu IP for years etc).