Maybe he means break a phone, because yah that happens even with softwareupdates to google software. Latest google photos update crashes it to many preview videos show up.
"I don't see how a driver update would "brick" a phone."
If your kernel fails to load because the driver, for example, overwrites some critical part of kernel memory, your phone is somewhat less useful than a brick.
It has little to do with money. They could make more large cores without very much trouble, but the phone TDP couldn't withstand them and they'd all throttle back. They're already going to be throttling quite a bit at 5 watts due to cooling issues (especially with a thick rubber case to insulate the device) and that's before talking about battery life.
I wonder. Wouldn't it be better to have 2 + 6 cores like Apple, rather than 4 large cores + 4 small cores? That way ARM could make their main Cortex Core wider and massively increase cache, which plays a large part in Apple's performance advantage.
Apple does 2+4. 6 A55s would not produce MT performance of 4 Apple Thunders though at energy-efficient frequencies.
I suspect with the right scheduler, something like 1+8 (or even 1+12) would be the best combination of ST and MT at any given TDP. Especially if the small cores are redesigned to say share L1I cache (in MT-critical things they mostly run the same loops) and wide decoder and have L0I (microcommand cache) and L1D per core. Maybe even secondary expensive ALUs for superscalar execution (cheap ops like add/sub or logic can have 2-3 ALUs in each cores for the cost of only a few transistors).
A better arrangement would be 3+5. Most applications are still threaded with "dual core" heirachy and few spilling over the "quad core" scheduling. So having a Third Large Core would keep the single core and dual core threads running well, whilst helping to smooth off those extra/stray threads.
The small cores are getting long in the tooth, and haven't had a decent upgrade since they were introduced back in 2015. Having the extra fifth core, and raising clocks would help slightly. But its no competition against Apple's Thunder Cores. To show you how impressive they really are, they are consuming (slightly) less than certain Cortex A55 cores whilst performing (slightly) faster than certain Cortex A73 cores.
ARM is already at the drawboard designing their next-generation architecture: ARM v9. So I suspect that's when we will see them leapfrog the competition in 2021-2022. I'm hoping for an APU design with a monolithic GPU at the centre, surrounded by a shared RAM, then chiplet CPUs, which are then surrounded by flash storage blocks and co-processors, with the I/O finally coming out from the SoC. That way they can scale it from 3W small-phones, to 5W large-phones, 7W tablets, 15W laptops, or even 45W for a Console/Desktop-like form factor.
Apple advantage/disavantage is they cannot have modem intergrated so they have more room for cpu. Qualcomm don't have their own cpu core design anymore and they use ARM Cortex. ARM Cortex cores was designed to be desktop-like scalable cpu, also be used on other application outside phone: like ARM server, ARM AI chip,...
Is there any chance mid-range phones would use it on a wide scale this time? I know SD730 was in very few phones last year, with most preferring the SD670 and others in the 6xx series. I'd love something like the Pixel 4a with the SD730, but I have a feeling Google will just use the SD675, which is also a mix of 2 A76 + 6 A55 cores, like the SD765 -- the differences lying in different processes and various other technologies in the latter, of course.
I'm curious why hisilicon couldn't get to these frequencies, as stated in the Kirin 990 article. What kind of frequencies were they hoping for? How did qcom achieve these frequencies? Did they tweak the libraries?
It is on Anand/Android Authority some time ago. Kirin chip need room to intergrate 5G, So they will use A77 in 5nm. Probably they has two 990 chips developed paralled, A76 and A77. The first win the race first to intergrated 5G flagship chip. The later will be know as Kirin 1020.
The Snapdragon 865 or Apple chips has the room because they don't have any modem intergrated with them, but at more cost, more power consumption. Currently the Huawei V30 is the cheapest 5G phone in the world, and it still has flagship chip. Mediatek chip specs `remains a question, because they declared it long ago but no one see any phone with it.
I didn't notice anything said about die size being a limiting factor for this decision. Here's the relevant section:
"A side note here: we had expected Huawei to launch the new Kirin with Arm’s latest A77 core, as it was announced earlier this year. Despite being a priority Arm partner member, the company’s technical team explained to us two things: firstly, the core decisions were made almost two years ago for this chip, but aside from that, they were not seeing the expected frequency from the A77 on TSMC’s 7nm processes.
Huawei stated that even though A77 hits higher peak performance, the power efficiency of the A77 and A76 on 7nm is practically identical, however due to better experience with A76 on 7nm, they were able to push the frequencies of the core much higher. It was cited that other companies with announced A77 products were only achieving 2.2 GHz on similar process technologies at other fabs. It was stated that A77 will likely come on a future product, most likely when 5nm becomes more widely available."
Doesn't ZSL just apply to stacked exposures?...On second thought Samsung probably already uses some sort of stacking in its auto HDR. Between the HMX lagging for a split second during capture, single exposure, and...sensor level binning? I'm hoping for the lag but suspect single exposure is more likely.
The bundled X55 is probably asking for a price bump on the price of the whole handset again, and for most people the 5G won't be touched for the lifetime of the device. To the surprise of nobody I guess?
If your data plan pricing goes down due to greater carrier efficiencies using 5G, it would be worth it. The biggest initial benefit might not be speed but cost per unit of data.
Actually are you sure about that? Say you're covered by a 20MHz wide band at 700MHz, you're saying running 5G on this band is cheaper per bit than running LTE on this same band? This seems to be the opposite to what I've heard, rather it's possibly cheaper on higher bands with immense scale, which only means urban centers to support saturating that usage.
"If your data plan pricing goes down due to greater carrier efficiencies using 5G, it would be worth it."
About as probable as somebody giving you $100 on the street.
And of course their costs are not going down given that they will now have to incur all the capital costs of 5G buildout. While almost nobody would still use it. And mmWave is totally useless because of its physics.
If one carrier starts offering you lower prices for the same data and the others don't follow suit, the others lose business so they had better follow suit. (It's up to regulators to keep this competition going and not allow collusion preventing competition here.)
Seems like most of the budget went to the DSP, some to the GPU, and some to the larger caches. Assuming no density changes for N7P, this is about 2.76 times the die area of the 855. According to:
I see how you got to roughly 200mm^2 for the package but i'm guessing something is off on the scale or the chip is much much smaller than the BGA package its on.
You are probably right. Considering that this bump is from 6 billion - x24 modem transistors, it should be a pretty healthy gain over the 855 in GPU and DSP. Next year's TSMC 5nm process with almost double the transistor density over its 7nm processes should bring far steeper gains even with an integrated x55 modem. I'm fully expecting +75-100% performance gains in GPU and DSP with gobs more cache; their next high end part might warrant a 9xx designation.
That's assuming to go over to a new architecture as well.
I'm more interested about CPU(s). A78, and if ARM will actually get off their asses and give us a successor for the A55, as they seriously need to up their game here, compared to Apple -- both in terms of power efficiency and performance. I'm sure the A78 will continue the 25% IPC improvement trend, which is still very nice, but it's in an A55 successor ARM needs to do something. It's ridiculous how Apple can make a new power-efficient core every single generation, whereas ARM, whose only task is to do this, and who supplies their designs to a huge industry for far more units than iPhones, spend 3 years between them.
There will be more straightforward gains for caches and units besides the CPU with a denser process as those workloads are more embarrassingly parallel even on the same slice/core/module architecture, and the bump from 7nm to 5nm in transistors per mobile SoC will be equal to today's mid-tier desktop GPUs.
It's unclear what went into this year's vastly improved Thunder cores in the A13, but at least some of it has to do with Apple's simpler cache hierarchy and ever bigger caches with 8MB of L2 for the 2 large cores, 4MB for the 4 small cores, and a whopping 16MB for the system level L3 cache; the A77 by comparison has 512KB-256k of L2 for the big cores, 128kb of L2 for the little cores, and 4MB of L3 + 3MB of system L4. There's also the fact that they don't need to address server class Neoverse style designs as well with whatever cores they design. Having no need to integrate a modem simplifies Apple's foundry process requirements and lets it devote more die area to its CPU and caches.
As for Android CPUs at 5nm, I could see Android SoCs going to 12 cores on the CPU side or going with more cache per core / CPU complex. I don't expect as much of a single threaded performance change with the Hercules core as it'll get tougher and tougher to wring out more performance from the A76 base design that it will be based on; the successor Matterhorn though... They changed the CPU cluster design greatly with the A75+A55 combo introducing an L3 cache and have seemingly maintained this uncore through A76+A55 and A77+A55; we'll see soon enough if they have a new small design at ARM's techday in May, maybe they'll use the A65AEs next year.
So, reading through this, will Snapdragon 865 catch up to the A12 SoC then? Maybe in some benchmarks? How is Apple so far ahead? Is this just because Qualcomm basically has no competition?
On floating point, quite possibly, but on integer it will be closer to A11 unless the L3 doubling and reduce memory latency help more than expected.
It's about cost reduction. It would be possible to use a 1MB L2 on all cores, use a 16MB or even 32MB L3 and increase frequency to get an easy 15-20% gain. But who wants to pay $50 extra for a performance gain that is hard to notice?
Using my wifes 11 Pro Max and the speed of everything is noticeable. switching apps, loading web pages, opening apps, touch inputs. everything feels better/faster.
So whatever they are doing, i wouldn't say it isn't 'hard to notice'. At this point it is a near certainty i will upgrade my S10+ to next years iPhone. first time I'll have bought iOS phone. the gap is widening and it's finally at a point where i'll put up with things about iOS i don't prefer for the overall superior experience.
That said, the snappiness of iPhones doesn't have especially much to do with peak single threaded integer throughput so much as IO and memory performance coupled with tight integration of iOS with hardware. The everyday use performance gains are also much more due to the better smaller cores in the A13 and the gains this year are much more impressive than those for the large cores which fuel the headlining single threaded geekbench score driving the most peoples' performance perceptions.
I myself have a OnePlus 5T with an 835 that feels very snappy on all the fronts you mention on the latest Oxygen OS build; it wasn't so with prior, less optimized Android images.
I was comparing it to the Pixel 4 XL that we got and returned after she basically hated it. the iPhone 11 is her first iPhone for personal use [has one for work phone]. The pixel 4 sure didn't feel snappy or performant in the way the new iPhone does. If its only down to software/OS optimizations that doesn't really make me feel better about getting another android phone.
I'm OG too, I had the T-Mobile G1 and loved it from the start.
I guess i'm too old now and basically just am willing to sacrifice certain preferences for overall improved UX.
I'm very disappointed with my Android phone's hardware, but I love the software. Poor battery standby time, poor CPU performance. At least I don't have to deal with AppleID nonsense (I've had 2 accounts lost from hacking from China in the last 10 years, and they can't just reset your accounts (this was before 2 factor) even I have control over the email addresses, so Apple lost me there. "Hello, I have the email address, send me a reset email" "Sorry we can't do anything, create another account" ... NONSENSE!!! I'm not making a third gmail account to make another AppleID account...
To be a bit more clear, the touch responsiveness and screen is better with my android, and the text message integration with windows is amazing (bring imessage to windows and maybe I'll get another iphone).
Yeah, there's obvious appeal to the seamless consumer electronics that Apple produces. They have an easier job than the likes of Qualcomm with its dozens of partners and on average end up with better results as well. I'm very impressed with their latest iPad Pro myself.
However, their homogeneity poses great risks to consumers and industry competition in the long run. They do not allow competing store fronts on their platform (which they should be forced to open with licensing on FRAND terms) and charge an exorbitant 30% fee to software writers. Their much touted security may only locally obfuscate severe bugs in their very large ecosystem:
Their treatment of suppliers is downright abusive, cheating business after business such as Dialog, Imagination, and Qualcomm out of their IP and stifling the ability of the industry to support competing products. There are real perils of vertical integration:
I hope Apple continues to keep the industry on its toes with its excellent execution, but I also hope it opens its platform, by regulatory force if necessary.
That's not a fair comparison, seeing as the 4 XL not only has an underclocked SD855, but also UFS 2.1 and not the best software performance optimization. Compare it to a OnePlus 7(T) Pro, which has much faster storage (UFS 3.0) performance, larger and better RAM management and proper performance optimization in both interface and in relation to the CPU, and the difference you claim to see will vanish. Just do yourself the favor and look at comparison videos on YouTube.
If software smoothness is what's important to you, I get your grievances. But then again, 90Hz makes up a lot of that (and more), and OxygenOS is probably the most stable and smooth third-party interface on Android after Pixel UI.
"the snappiness of iPhones doesn't have especially much to do with peak single threaded integer throughput so much as IO and memory performance coupled with tight integration of iOS with hardware."
People keep claiming this. But that SAME tight OS integration has existed on every iPhone since at least the A6 and A7... Even so, every year I can tell feel the increased fluidity of the new phones. Even at iPhone 6 people were claiming that phones were fast enough, that they never dropped frames. And yet each successive 20% to 30% annual boost is notable in feeling that much smoother, especially as ever more of the UI is built around swiping in different directions rather than tapping.
Are we NOW maxed out? Certainly when I use my A12 and A12X based phone+iPad I don't NOW feel any delays in the UI that bug me. (Every year it's got better; with iPhone 6 it was at the point of "thank god I don't have to wait", since then it has been "yes, definitely smoother, no stuttering, feels right"). And you could say, at this point, OK, good enough, we don't need to do more. Certainly plenty of people seem to think that way (many on the Android side, at least some on the Apple side). But there's is still so much more phones COULD do. Where's my real-time translation (text and speech)? Where's my assistant fixing my typos at the sentence and paragraph level, rather than at the basic (and not THAT accurate) word-by-word level? If you change the question from "is my phone now fast enough" to "what would I like my phone to do, to hell with practicality or current software technology" you look at CPU design in a very different way.
Apple is certainly on that second track. ARM and QC I think also are for the past few years, though it's not an especially natural place for them, and I wouldn't be surprised if the inside voices pushing for excellence are in a fragile position, liable to be ousted if there's a single false step...
CPUs aren't responsible for much of the heavy lifting in the tasks you're describing like smooth UX scrolling or voice translation. They handle control general purpose program flow which is memory intensive or dynamic recompilation which can bottleneck in some cases like browser execution of Javascript or during just plain benchmarking scenarios.
The small cores, larger caches, better buses / IO, GPU compositing functions, and the new AI units are much more responsible for typical user experience than peak CPU single threaded performance, and indeed Apple excels here too but not to the degree they do over Android SoCs in the single threaded metric. Apple is riding high on the positive wave of press and user perception over its excellent CPU performance though due to its being one of the only components on an SoC that's easy to systematically benchmark and publicize.
That gap is NOT widening. It is closing. SD855 essentially cut the gap by a 40%, to its lowest point in many years. Even SD865, with A77, is making sure that gap has not widened (in fact, slightly decreased). So your comment is false.
Where the gap has been widening, is in Apple's efficiency cores and in GPU performance, however. Here, ARM and Qualcomm have a lot of work to do.
Now there are a market for gamer chip. But before QC don't have room as Apple as they have integrated 4G modem. The 865 is the first to have the same room as Apple
While Geekbench is not a perfect benchmark ( No Benchmark is ever perfect ), it is a good tool to estimate performance.
The best Single Core Performance of 855 is around ˜710, so a 25% increase would be around 900. an iPhone 8 does 900+, iPhone XS does 1100, and iPhone 11 does 1300.
Of coz MultiCore would blow past iPhone X or even XS. But I dont care much about MultiCore Performance. You are still fundamentally limited by Single Core performance.
And of course, your System Performance ( Not your CPU performance ) depends a lot on Software, NAND Speed, Controller, Memory etc.
That wasn't the entirety of the issue. The M cores used more power and had difficulty actually keeping the ports busy. The later is why, in practice, despite a very wide core it doesn't perform much, if any, better than the analogous cortex a.
No, GB is not a good bench. Anandtech proved it with the S9 Exynos review. GB showed Exynos high and mighty. In reality it was below SD845 which had lower GB numbers than Exynos.
Well, yeah. 25% IPC is pretty healthy, seing as A12's IPC was what, 13%? Also the big closing of gap that the A76 and SD855 did, has remained -- or rather, ever so slightly decreased. It's pretty clear by now that Apple is reaching a stagnation point in CPU architecture, as seen in the modest increases of both A12 and A13. A14 will maybe see a bigger improvement in the big jump to 5nm, but I expect A78 to get the exact same advantage as well.
Wait, Zen 3 is supposed to be on 7nm EUV. I wonder if TSMC's capacity is simply outstripped by demand or if they really do have very little capacity. If the latter is true, it looks like AMD fans are in for a long wait...however, I doubt that is the case.
Zen 3 is put in later part of 2020, unlike, SD,865, by which time EUV is available in larger quantities. Also Zen CPUs don't sell in nearly as large numbers as SD flagship SOCs...
Andrei, something I asked last year, but never got an answer --- maybe this year QC will tell us: - is the fast core actually different from the slow cores in that it's using faster transistors? Or could the slow cores equally well be clocked at 2.84GHz if QC policy allowed it?
Or to put it differently, what's the energy excess for solving a problem at 2.84GHz rather than at 2.42? Is the slope so steep that running more than one core that fast was utterly infeasible? (Point is, if it's the same transistors, so all cores could clock to 2.84, then it's usual quadratic overhead. But if the 2.84 circuits use HP rather than HE/HD transistors, the energy excess could be quite a bit higher.)
In the past QC give the one fast core more cache too. Energy aside, if they use all fast cores and a core failed that speed then the whole soc is failed, more cost overall
I still not quite understand why they have not really bothered to have true LOW - Mid - HIGH speed for the whole bunch of cores, I imagine would not be "that hard" would keep power use in check big time as well (save battery life, as pretty much all phone makers these days only want to sell a SEALED phone..let them play their game, let us enjoy what we have as long as possible)
example
top core at whatever Ghz range, the mid cores at 1/2 to 1/3 less than this, the low cores (have maybe more of) but 1/2 the mid speed
so (again example)
1 @ 2.84Ghz 3 @ 1.42 or 1.89 4 @ 710Mhz or 945Mhz
I am quite certain with the "tweaking" they do and have done (for a number of years now)
even at say 500Mhz on 4 cores, it will still be able to handle many many things "just fine" provided they work their magic so it feeds and is fed by the memory and/or graphics properly
heck, they might even be able to use the good chunk extra power drop to clock the graphics up so even though it ends up using LESS power (stays very cool as well) still feels snappy as lightning
We have the technology, why not use it far more "intelligently" I ask?
"We have the technology, why not use it far more "intelligently" I ask?"
Total MT performance IN TESTS of your 1+3+4 configuration would be significantly lower than current 1+3+4 configuration, and review sites still insist on publishing irrelevant numbers.
The best configuration would probably be 1 superfast+16 superefficient.
Quote: "We also expect some compromises in terms of battery efficiency due to the silicon overhead, however as a counter-argument, Apple’s iPhones always have had separate AP+modem solutions, and the latest generation this year had amongst the strongest battery life performance of any device out there, even with a competing Intel modem."
No you tested iPhone on wifi without 4G usage so cannot say it had strong battery life in 4G or 5G.
>Qualcomm says this would be possible if you essentially just ignore the X55’s 5G capabilities, but they don’t see any reason for any vendor to actually do this. In essence, bar any abnormal decision from some vendors, all Snapdragon 865 devices in 2020 will be full 5G devices.
I'll definitely take the one without the cellular equivalent of a cancer stick embedded in it (5G).
There is a non-zero probability that mmWave in phones will be prohibited in 10 years. Not that anybody would really miss it as it does not work in real-life situations anyway (does not even penetrate your head/body, just warms and/or injures it).
"The X55 modem has had a lead time to market, being available earlier than the Snapdragon 865 SoC by several months. OEM vendors thus would have been able to already start developing their 2020 handset designs on the X55+S855 platform, focusing on getting the RF subsystems right, and then once the S865 becomes available, it would be a rather simple integration of the new AP without having to do much changes to the connectivity components of the new device design."
Uh, why not just integrate the X55 into the S865 then?
Well Samsung Exynos 990 for S11 also don't have 5G intergrated. So I guess they have to chose between 5G modem intergrated and new core Cortex A77. And even if they choose 5G they will need the latest 7nm EUV production line, which there are rumors of low yield.
"Uh, why not just integrate the X55 into the S865 then?"
Qualcomm already explained why. Size constrains, power constrains which result in lower peak speeds. By integrated the 5G modem overall 5G speeds will be lower as you can see with the Kirin 990 5G.
From the article: "Apple’s iPhones always have had separate AP+modem solutions, and the latest generation this year had amongst the strongest battery life performance of any device out there, even with a competing Intel modem."
Andrei, as what I can see from your iPhone 11 review, the comparison you made which shows great iphone 11 battery life is based on a WiFi test instead of 4G.. In such test scenario, modem shouldn't even be in the picture. How could that imply a separate modem doesn't make much power differences..? Is this a mistake?
Thanks Andrei! Question about 5G: in Huawei's implementation in their 990 chipset, they apparently use one of their 2 AI core clusters to assist with beam forming and other 5G-related tasks. Does Qualcomm use its AI circuitry similarly, and is this the reason for the beefed-up AI on their new SoCs? Thanks!
"Qualcomm allows vendors to choose between LP4X and LP5 in their device implementations"
BIG mistake, as most will choose to save a couple of $$ on $800+ devices with 865. Given the graphics is integrated, there are quite a few situations where perf is going to be memory-speed-limited.
"No, the Snapdragon 865 doesn’t support the AV1 codec for video decoding. It looks like we’ll have to wait for the next generation for that."
No, AV1 does not offer any PRACTICAL advantages over H.265 to 99.99%+ of consumers, so very very few people who care about that particular practically irrelevant thing will wait for that.
Note the word PRACTICAL (I cannot emphasize it more on your comment software).
More interesting (but also almost irrelevant at this point) thing would be what specific profiles of H.265 their codec supports.
Oh,c'mon , stop already with this 5G hyper-ventilated-horse-beaten-to-death thingie . I think 4G is already more then enough for most regular user scenarios,and even all those radio waves (combined with normal radio-TV-2G-etc) are screwing our bodies already haha . A start to consider : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG8f5kUpbcg
I just hope that in the statse we'll actually be able to buy a phone based on the new 7xx chipset. We seem to get 6xx junk or strait to the overpriced 8xx stuff. No great upper midrange phones :(
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Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
The GPU driver updates over Playstore is a very welcome development!MooseMuffin - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Or a fun new way to brick phones. Time will tell!Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
It could always fall back to a terminal...Vince789 - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Most Android phones use A/B partitions now days anywaystuxRoller - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I don't see how a driver update would "brick" a phone.If nothing else, there should be drm-kms or fbdev fallback.
imaheadcase - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Maybe he means break a phone, because yah that happens even with softwareupdates to google software. Latest google photos update crashes it to many preview videos show up.tuxRoller - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Yeah, that's certainly happens.peevee - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
"I don't see how a driver update would "brick" a phone."If your kernel fails to load because the driver, for example, overwrites some critical part of kernel memory, your phone is somewhat less useful than a brick.
extide - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Sticking to the 1/3/4 formula again. Meh, I'd soo rather 2/2/4 or hell give me 4 of those phat cores. I'll pay for it.quadrivial - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
It has little to do with money. They could make more large cores without very much trouble, but the phone TDP couldn't withstand them and they'd all throttle back. They're already going to be throttling quite a bit at 5 watts due to cooling issues (especially with a thick rubber case to insulate the device) and that's before talking about battery life.generalako - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
I wonder. Wouldn't it be better to have 2 + 6 cores like Apple, rather than 4 large cores + 4 small cores? That way ARM could make their main Cortex Core wider and massively increase cache, which plays a large part in Apple's performance advantage.peevee - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Apple does 2+4.6 A55s would not produce MT performance of 4 Apple Thunders though at energy-efficient frequencies.
I suspect with the right scheduler, something like 1+8 (or even 1+12) would be the best combination of ST and MT at any given TDP.
Especially if the small cores are redesigned to say share L1I cache (in MT-critical things they mostly run the same loops) and wide decoder and have L0I (microcommand cache) and L1D per core. Maybe even secondary expensive ALUs for superscalar execution (cheap ops like add/sub or logic can have 2-3 ALUs in each cores for the cost of only a few transistors).
Kangal - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
A better arrangement would be 3+5.Most applications are still threaded with "dual core" heirachy and few spilling over the "quad core" scheduling. So having a Third Large Core would keep the single core and dual core threads running well, whilst helping to smooth off those extra/stray threads.
The small cores are getting long in the tooth, and haven't had a decent upgrade since they were introduced back in 2015. Having the extra fifth core, and raising clocks would help slightly. But its no competition against Apple's Thunder Cores. To show you how impressive they really are, they are consuming (slightly) less than certain Cortex A55 cores whilst performing (slightly) faster than certain Cortex A73 cores.
ARM is already at the drawboard designing their next-generation architecture: ARM v9. So I suspect that's when we will see them leapfrog the competition in 2021-2022. I'm hoping for an APU design with a monolithic GPU at the centre, surrounded by a shared RAM, then chiplet CPUs, which are then surrounded by flash storage blocks and co-processors, with the I/O finally coming out from the SoC. That way they can scale it from 3W small-phones, to 5W large-phones, 7W tablets, 15W laptops, or even 45W for a Console/Desktop-like form factor.
Kabm - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Apple advantage/disavantage is they cannot have modem intergrated so they have more room for cpu. Qualcomm don't have their own cpu core design anymore and they use ARM Cortex. ARM Cortex cores was designed to be desktop-like scalable cpu, also be used on other application outside phone: like ARM server, ARM AI chip,...Andrew Art - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Hi, Andrei.Read your article. Everything was good as well.
Could you tell Snapdragon 765 contained AI engine? Yes or not? It doesn't clear in the article. Please update article about that.
If yes, how much TOPS will be at Snapdragon 765 AI engine?
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I updated the tables. The 765 is 5.4TOPS total across CPU+GPU+HVX+Tensor.PeterCollier - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
So what Android applications actually take advantage of the AI acceleration?Amandtec - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
There is a Android app called "GAFA Spies on You" which uses tons of inference, No TOP will go to waste...generalako - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Is there any chance mid-range phones would use it on a wide scale this time? I know SD730 was in very few phones last year, with most preferring the SD670 and others in the 6xx series. I'd love something like the Pixel 4a with the SD730, but I have a feeling Google will just use the SD675, which is also a mix of 2 A76 + 6 A55 cores, like the SD765 -- the differences lying in different processes and various other technologies in the latter, of course.tuxRoller - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I'm curious why hisilicon couldn't get to these frequencies, as stated in the Kirin 990 article.What kind of frequencies were they hoping for?
How did qcom achieve these frequencies? Did they tweak the libraries?
Kabm - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
It is on Anand/Android Authority some time ago. Kirin chip need room to intergrate 5G, So they will use A77 in 5nm. Probably they has two 990 chips developed paralled, A76 and A77. The first win the race first to intergrated 5G flagship chip. The later will be know as Kirin 1020.The Snapdragon 865 or Apple chips has the room because they don't have any modem intergrated with them, but at more cost, more power consumption. Currently the Huawei V30 is the cheapest 5G phone in the world, and it still has flagship chip. Mediatek chip specs `remains a question, because they declared it long ago but no one see any phone with it.
tuxRoller - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
I had this article in mind (https://www.anandtech.com/show/14851/huawei-announ...I didn't notice anything said about die size being a limiting factor for this decision.
Here's the relevant section:
"A side note here: we had expected Huawei to launch the new Kirin with Arm’s latest A77 core, as it was announced earlier this year. Despite being a priority Arm partner member, the company’s technical team explained to us two things: firstly, the core decisions were made almost two years ago for this chip, but aside from that, they were not seeing the expected frequency from the A77 on TSMC’s 7nm processes.
Huawei stated that even though A77 hits higher peak performance, the power efficiency of the A77 and A76 on 7nm is practically identical, however due to better experience with A76 on 7nm, they were able to push the frequencies of the core much higher. It was cited that other companies with announced A77 products were only achieving 2.2 GHz on similar process technologies at other fabs. It was stated that A77 will likely come on a future product, most likely when 5nm becomes more widely available."
Make sense?
s.yu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Doesn't ZSL just apply to stacked exposures?...On second thought Samsung probably already uses some sort of stacking in its auto HDR.Between the HMX lagging for a split second during capture, single exposure, and...sensor level binning? I'm hoping for the lag but suspect single exposure is more likely.
s.yu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
The bundled X55 is probably asking for a price bump on the price of the whole handset again, and for most people the 5G won't be touched for the lifetime of the device.To the surprise of nobody I guess?
Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
If your data plan pricing goes down due to greater carrier efficiencies using 5G, it would be worth it. The biggest initial benefit might not be speed but cost per unit of data.s.yu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Yeah regarding that...I believe it relies on net neutrality, not available in all markets, as I commented in a previous article:https://www.anandtech.com/show/15187/fireside-inte...
Actually are you sure about that? Say you're covered by a 20MHz wide band at 700MHz, you're saying running 5G on this band is cheaper per bit than running LTE on this same band? This seems to be the opposite to what I've heard, rather it's possibly cheaper on higher bands with immense scale, which only means urban centers to support saturating that usage.
peevee - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
"If your data plan pricing goes down due to greater carrier efficiencies using 5G, it would be worth it."About as probable as somebody giving you $100 on the street.
And of course their costs are not going down given that they will now have to incur all the capital costs of 5G buildout. While almost nobody would still use it.
And mmWave is totally useless because of its physics.
Raqia - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
If one carrier starts offering you lower prices for the same data and the others don't follow suit, the others lose business so they had better follow suit. (It's up to regulators to keep this competition going and not allow collusion preventing competition here.)Kabm - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
On the otherhand, the 865 chip look very big and a gamer chip, so Samsung may not use them on all S11 version.Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Die size and transistor count info would be appreciated Andrei, particularly for the 865 and the x55. :)Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
No transistor disclosure from QC. For die sizes, we'll likely have to wait a few months.Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Quick and dirty pixel counting on this pic of a penny (19.05 mm diameter, ~285 mm^2) next to the 865 gives ~200mm^2 for the package:https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/...
Seems like most of the budget went to the DSP, some to the GPU, and some to the larger caches. Assuming no density changes for N7P, this is about 2.76 times the die area of the 855. According to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comm...
The 855 weighs in at about 6B transistors. Quick and dirty estimate: ~16.55B transistors?
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I'd gather your off in your estimate by about 8-9B transistors.Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
You're probably right given this shot of the 8cx:https://scdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...
which weighs in at around 10B transistors at 122mm^2 and has a larger package size. :)
tijag - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
A13 manufactured on this node is 8.5B transistors, doubt strongly the 865 will be much more than that.tijag - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I see how you got to roughly 200mm^2 for the package but i'm guessing something is off on the scale or the chip is much much smaller than the BGA package its on.skavi - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I'm going to guess ~85mm^2 with ~7 billion transistors based on the image.Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
You are probably right. Considering that this bump is from 6 billion - x24 modem transistors, it should be a pretty healthy gain over the 855 in GPU and DSP. Next year's TSMC 5nm process with almost double the transistor density over its 7nm processes should bring far steeper gains even with an integrated x55 modem. I'm fully expecting +75-100% performance gains in GPU and DSP with gobs more cache; their next high end part might warrant a 9xx designation.generalako - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
That's assuming to go over to a new architecture as well.I'm more interested about CPU(s). A78, and if ARM will actually get off their asses and give us a successor for the A55, as they seriously need to up their game here, compared to Apple -- both in terms of power efficiency and performance. I'm sure the A78 will continue the 25% IPC improvement trend, which is still very nice, but it's in an A55 successor ARM needs to do something. It's ridiculous how Apple can make a new power-efficient core every single generation, whereas ARM, whose only task is to do this, and who supplies their designs to a huge industry for far more units than iPhones, spend 3 years between them.
Raqia - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
There will be more straightforward gains for caches and units besides the CPU with a denser process as those workloads are more embarrassingly parallel even on the same slice/core/module architecture, and the bump from 7nm to 5nm in transistors per mobile SoC will be equal to today's mid-tier desktop GPUs.It's unclear what went into this year's vastly improved Thunder cores in the A13, but at least some of it has to do with Apple's simpler cache hierarchy and ever bigger caches with 8MB of L2 for the 2 large cores, 4MB for the 4 small cores, and a whopping 16MB for the system level L3 cache; the A77 by comparison has 512KB-256k of L2 for the big cores, 128kb of L2 for the little cores, and 4MB of L3 + 3MB of system L4. There's also the fact that they don't need to address server class Neoverse style designs as well with whatever cores they design. Having no need to integrate a modem simplifies Apple's foundry process requirements and lets it devote more die area to its CPU and caches.
As for Android CPUs at 5nm, I could see Android SoCs going to 12 cores on the CPU side or going with more cache per core / CPU complex. I don't expect as much of a single threaded performance change with the Hercules core as it'll get tougher and tougher to wring out more performance from the A76 base design that it will be based on; the successor Matterhorn though... They changed the CPU cluster design greatly with the A75+A55 combo introducing an L3 cache and have seemingly maintained this uncore through A76+A55 and A77+A55; we'll see soon enough if they have a new small design at ARM's techday in May, maybe they'll use the A65AEs next year.
nandnandnand - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
"No, the Snapdragon 865 doesn’t support the AV1 codec for video decoding."Insert the Crapdragon 865 into a region of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing can escape from it.
ksec - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Best Announcement to Date ever. Just to reiterate again Qualcomm is not a member of Open Media Alliance.And I hope AV1 wont gain any traction.
nandnandnand - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Prepare to be disappointed, loser.levizx - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
What an idiot.tijag - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
So, reading through this, will Snapdragon 865 catch up to the A12 SoC then? Maybe in some benchmarks? How is Apple so far ahead? Is this just because Qualcomm basically has no competition?Wilco1 - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
On floating point, quite possibly, but on integer it will be closer to A11 unless the L3 doubling and reduce memory latency help more than expected.It's about cost reduction. It would be possible to use a 1MB L2 on all cores, use a 16MB or even 32MB L3 and increase frequency to get an easy 15-20% gain. But who wants to pay $50 extra for a performance gain that is hard to notice?
tijag - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Using my wifes 11 Pro Max and the speed of everything is noticeable. switching apps, loading web pages, opening apps, touch inputs. everything feels better/faster.So whatever they are doing, i wouldn't say it isn't 'hard to notice'. At this point it is a near certainty i will upgrade my S10+ to next years iPhone. first time I'll have bought iOS phone. the gap is widening and it's finally at a point where i'll put up with things about iOS i don't prefer for the overall superior experience.
Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
That said, the snappiness of iPhones doesn't have especially much to do with peak single threaded integer throughput so much as IO and memory performance coupled with tight integration of iOS with hardware. The everyday use performance gains are also much more due to the better smaller cores in the A13 and the gains this year are much more impressive than those for the large cores which fuel the headlining single threaded geekbench score driving the most peoples' performance perceptions.I myself have a OnePlus 5T with an 835 that feels very snappy on all the fronts you mention on the latest Oxygen OS build; it wasn't so with prior, less optimized Android images.
tijag - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I was comparing it to the Pixel 4 XL that we got and returned after she basically hated it. the iPhone 11 is her first iPhone for personal use [has one for work phone]. The pixel 4 sure didn't feel snappy or performant in the way the new iPhone does. If its only down to software/OS optimizations that doesn't really make me feel better about getting another android phone.I'm OG too, I had the T-Mobile G1 and loved it from the start.
I guess i'm too old now and basically just am willing to sacrifice certain preferences for overall improved UX.
Alistair - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I'm very disappointed with my Android phone's hardware, but I love the software. Poor battery standby time, poor CPU performance. At least I don't have to deal with AppleID nonsense (I've had 2 accounts lost from hacking from China in the last 10 years, and they can't just reset your accounts (this was before 2 factor) even I have control over the email addresses, so Apple lost me there. "Hello, I have the email address, send me a reset email" "Sorry we can't do anything, create another account" ... NONSENSE!!! I'm not making a third gmail account to make another AppleID account...Alistair - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
To be a bit more clear, the touch responsiveness and screen is better with my android, and the text message integration with windows is amazing (bring imessage to windows and maybe I'll get another iphone).Raqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Yeah, there's obvious appeal to the seamless consumer electronics that Apple produces. They have an easier job than the likes of Qualcomm with its dozens of partners and on average end up with better results as well. I'm very impressed with their latest iPad Pro myself.However, their homogeneity poses great risks to consumers and industry competition in the long run. They do not allow competing store fronts on their platform (which they should be forced to open with licensing on FRAND terms) and charge an exorbitant 30% fee to software writers.
Their much touted security may only locally obfuscate severe bugs in their very large ecosystem:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pajkkz/its-almo...
Their treatment of suppliers is downright abusive, cheating business after business such as Dialog, Imagination, and Qualcomm out of their IP and stifling the ability of the industry to support competing products. There are real perils of vertical integration:
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=133200...
I hope Apple continues to keep the industry on its toes with its excellent execution, but I also hope it opens its platform, by regulatory force if necessary.
generalako - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
That's not a fair comparison, seeing as the 4 XL not only has an underclocked SD855, but also UFS 2.1 and not the best software performance optimization. Compare it to a OnePlus 7(T) Pro, which has much faster storage (UFS 3.0) performance, larger and better RAM management and proper performance optimization in both interface and in relation to the CPU, and the difference you claim to see will vanish. Just do yourself the favor and look at comparison videos on YouTube.If software smoothness is what's important to you, I get your grievances. But then again, 90Hz makes up a lot of that (and more), and OxygenOS is probably the most stable and smooth third-party interface on Android after Pixel UI.
name99 - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
"the snappiness of iPhones doesn't have especially much to do with peak single threaded integer throughput so much as IO and memory performance coupled with tight integration of iOS with hardware."People keep claiming this. But that SAME tight OS integration has existed on every iPhone since at least the A6 and A7...
Even so, every year I can tell feel the increased fluidity of the new phones. Even at iPhone 6 people were claiming that phones were fast enough, that they never dropped frames. And yet each successive 20% to 30% annual boost is notable in feeling that much smoother, especially as ever more of the UI is built around swiping in different directions rather than tapping.
Are we NOW maxed out? Certainly when I use my A12 and A12X based phone+iPad I don't NOW feel any delays in the UI that bug me. (Every year it's got better; with iPhone 6 it was at the point of "thank god I don't have to wait", since then it has been "yes, definitely smoother, no stuttering, feels right").
And you could say, at this point, OK, good enough, we don't need to do more. Certainly plenty of people seem to think that way (many on the Android side, at least some on the Apple side). But there's is still so much more phones COULD do. Where's my real-time translation (text and speech)? Where's my assistant fixing my typos at the sentence and paragraph level, rather than at the basic (and not THAT accurate) word-by-word level?
If you change the question from "is my phone now fast enough" to "what would I like my phone to do, to hell with practicality or current software technology" you look at CPU design in a very different way.
Apple is certainly on that second track. ARM and QC I think also are for the past few years, though it's not an especially natural place for them, and I wouldn't be surprised if the inside voices pushing for excellence are in a fragile position, liable to be ousted if there's a single false step...
Raqia - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
CPUs aren't responsible for much of the heavy lifting in the tasks you're describing like smooth UX scrolling or voice translation. They handle control general purpose program flow which is memory intensive or dynamic recompilation which can bottleneck in some cases like browser execution of Javascript or during just plain benchmarking scenarios.The small cores, larger caches, better buses / IO, GPU compositing functions, and the new AI units are much more responsible for typical user experience than peak CPU single threaded performance, and indeed Apple excels here too but not to the degree they do over Android SoCs in the single threaded metric. Apple is riding high on the positive wave of press and user perception over its excellent CPU performance though due to its being one of the only components on an SoC that's easy to systematically benchmark and publicize.
Sharma_Ji - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
If you get time some someday, use some snappy android phones from likes of 1+, Asus, etc.Ironchef3500 - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
I am starting to feel the same way..generalako - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
That gap is NOT widening. It is closing. SD855 essentially cut the gap by a 40%, to its lowest point in many years. Even SD865, with A77, is making sure that gap has not widened (in fact, slightly decreased). So your comment is false.Where the gap has been widening, is in Apple's efficiency cores and in GPU performance, however. Here, ARM and Qualcomm have a lot of work to do.
Kabm - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Now there are a market for gamer chip. But before QC don't have room as Apple as they have integrated 4G modem. The 865 is the first to have the same room as Appleksec - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
While Geekbench is not a perfect benchmark ( No Benchmark is ever perfect ), it is a good tool to estimate performance.The best Single Core Performance of 855 is around ˜710, so a 25% increase would be around 900. an iPhone 8 does 900+, iPhone XS does 1100, and iPhone 11 does 1300.
Of coz MultiCore would blow past iPhone X or even XS. But I dont care much about MultiCore Performance. You are still fundamentally limited by Single Core performance.
And of course, your System Performance ( Not your CPU performance ) depends a lot on Software, NAND Speed, Controller, Memory etc.
Kabm - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
if single core benchmark is the best then Samsung didn't need to cancel their M cores!tuxRoller - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
That wasn't the entirety of the issue. The M cores used more power and had difficulty actually keeping the ports busy. The later is why, in practice, despite a very wide core it doesn't perform much, if any, better than the analogous cortex a.id4andrei - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
No, GB is not a good bench. Anandtech proved it with the S9 Exynos review. GB showed Exynos high and mighty. In reality it was below SD845 which had lower GB numbers than Exynos.Kabm - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Apple always have more room for chip because they don't have intergrated modem. When test Apple chips battery usage, be sure to use 4G, 5G test.generalako - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Well, yeah. 25% IPC is pretty healthy, seing as A12's IPC was what, 13%? Also the big closing of gap that the A76 and SD855 did, has remained -- or rather, ever so slightly decreased. It's pretty clear by now that Apple is reaching a stagnation point in CPU architecture, as seen in the modest increases of both A12 and A13. A14 will maybe see a bigger improvement in the big jump to 5nm, but I expect A78 to get the exact same advantage as well.Wardrive86 - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Will current GPU drivers be updateable over play store (SD855,SD845, etc. based devices) or only 865/765 and newer based devices?Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Only newer devices going forward.eek2121 - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Wait, Zen 3 is supposed to be on 7nm EUV. I wonder if TSMC's capacity is simply outstripped by demand or if they really do have very little capacity. If the latter is true, it looks like AMD fans are in for a long wait...however, I doubt that is the case.generalako - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link
Zen 3 is put in later part of 2020, unlike, SD,865, by which time EUV is available in larger quantities. Also Zen CPUs don't sell in nearly as large numbers as SD flagship SOCs...DustCounter - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Does the SD765/G DPU "natively" support 120hz? Since the Xiaomi Redmi K30 rumors says that it has 120hz and confirmed SD765Gname99 - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Andrei, something I asked last year, but never got an answer --- maybe this year QC will tell us:- is the fast core actually different from the slow cores in that it's using faster transistors? Or could the slow cores equally well be clocked at 2.84GHz if QC policy allowed it?
Or to put it differently, what's the energy excess for solving a problem at 2.84GHz rather than at 2.42? Is the slope so steep that running more than one core that fast was utterly infeasible?
(Point is, if it's the same transistors, so all cores could clock to 2.84, then it's usual quadratic overhead. But if the 2.84 circuits use HP rather than HE/HD transistors, the energy excess could be quite a bit higher.)
Kabm - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
In the past QC give the one fast core more cache too. Energy aside, if they use all fast cores and a core failed that speed then the whole soc is failed, more cost overallRaqia - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
The transistors used on the prime core have a larger pitch and use more fins:https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2408/tsmc-7nm-hd-an...
name99 - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Thanks! Great link.Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
It's a physically different core.Dragonstongue - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I still not quite understand why they have not really bothered to have true LOW - Mid - HIGH speed for the whole bunch of cores, I imagine would not be "that hard" would keep power use in check big time as well (save battery life, as pretty much all phone makers these days only want to sell a SEALED phone..let them play their game, let us enjoy what we have as long as possible)example
top core at whatever Ghz range, the mid cores at 1/2 to 1/3 less than this, the low cores (have maybe more of) but 1/2 the mid speed
so (again example)
1 @ 2.84Ghz
3 @ 1.42 or 1.89
4 @ 710Mhz or 945Mhz
I am quite certain with the "tweaking" they do and have done (for a number of years now)
even at say 500Mhz on 4 cores, it will still be able to handle many many things "just fine" provided they work their magic so it feeds and is fed by the memory and/or graphics properly
heck, they might even be able to use the good chunk extra power drop to clock the graphics up so even though it ends up using LESS power (stays very cool as well) still feels snappy as lightning
We have the technology, why not use it far more "intelligently" I ask?
peevee - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
"We have the technology, why not use it far more "intelligently" I ask?"Total MT performance IN TESTS of your 1+3+4 configuration would be significantly lower than current 1+3+4 configuration, and review sites still insist on publishing irrelevant numbers.
The best configuration would probably be 1 superfast+16 superefficient.
Kabm - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Quote: "We also expect some compromises in terms of battery efficiency due to the silicon overhead, however as a counter-argument, Apple’s iPhones always have had separate AP+modem solutions, and the latest generation this year had amongst the strongest battery life performance of any device out there, even with a competing Intel modem."No you tested iPhone on wifi without 4G usage so cannot say it had strong battery life in 4G or 5G.
yacoub35 - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
>Qualcomm says this would be possible if you essentially just ignore the X55’s 5G capabilities, but they don’t see any reason for any vendor to actually do this. In essence, bar any abnormal decision from some vendors, all Snapdragon 865 devices in 2020 will be full 5G devices.I'll definitely take the one without the cellular equivalent of a cancer stick embedded in it (5G).
peevee - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
There is a non-zero probability that mmWave in phones will be prohibited in 10 years. Not that anybody would really miss it as it does not work in real-life situations anyway (does not even penetrate your head/body, just warms and/or injures it).Pro-competition - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
"The X55 modem has had a lead time to market, being available earlier than the Snapdragon 865 SoC by several months. OEM vendors thus would have been able to already start developing their 2020 handset designs on the X55+S855 platform, focusing on getting the RF subsystems right, and then once the S865 becomes available, it would be a rather simple integration of the new AP without having to do much changes to the connectivity components of the new device design."Uh, why not just integrate the X55 into the S865 then?
Kabm - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Well Samsung Exynos 990 for S11 also don't have 5G intergrated. So I guess they have to chose between 5G modem intergrated and new core Cortex A77. And even if they choose 5G they will need the latest 7nm EUV production line, which there are rumors of low yield.Nicon0s - Wednesday, February 19, 2020 - link
"Uh, why not just integrate the X55 into the S865 then?"Qualcomm already explained why.
Size constrains, power constrains which result in lower peak speeds. By integrated the 5G modem overall 5G speeds will be lower as you can see with the Kirin 990 5G.
helloworld_chip - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
From the article: "Apple’s iPhones always have had separate AP+modem solutions, and the latest generation this year had amongst the strongest battery life performance of any device out there, even with a competing Intel modem."Andrei, as what I can see from your iPhone 11 review, the comparison you made which shows great iphone 11 battery life is based on a WiFi test instead of 4G.. In such test scenario, modem shouldn't even be in the picture. How could that imply a separate modem doesn't make much power differences..? Is this a mistake?
eastcoast_pete - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
Thanks Andrei! Question about 5G: in Huawei's implementation in their 990 chipset, they apparently use one of their 2 AI core clusters to assist with beam forming and other 5G-related tasks. Does Qualcomm use its AI circuitry similarly, and is this the reason for the beefed-up AI on their new SoCs? Thanks!peevee - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link
"Qualcomm allows vendors to choose between LP4X and LP5 in their device implementations"BIG mistake, as most will choose to save a couple of $$ on $800+ devices with 865. Given the graphics is integrated, there are quite a few situations where perf is going to be memory-speed-limited.
peevee - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
"No, the Snapdragon 865 doesn’t support the AV1 codec for video decoding. It looks like we’ll have to wait for the next generation for that."No, AV1 does not offer any PRACTICAL advantages over H.265 to 99.99%+ of consumers, so very very few people who care about that particular practically irrelevant thing will wait for that.
Note the word PRACTICAL (I cannot emphasize it more on your comment software).
More interesting (but also almost irrelevant at this point) thing would be what specific profiles of H.265 their codec supports.
AidenP - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Oh,c'mon , stop already with this 5G hyper-ventilated-horse-beaten-to-death thingie .I think 4G is already more then enough for most regular user scenarios,and even all those radio waves (combined with normal radio-TV-2G-etc) are screwing our bodies already haha .
A start to consider : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG8f5kUpbcg
HideOut - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
I just hope that in the statse we'll actually be able to buy a phone based on the new 7xx chipset. We seem to get 6xx junk or strait to the overpriced 8xx stuff. No great upper midrange phones :(Please tell me the pixel 4a will have this!
Wardrive86 - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
The DRAM for the Snapdragon 855 in the table is labled wrong457R4LDR34DKN07 - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Don't you think it is important mentioning that the 765 x52 supports wifi6 ax?