Snapdragon 805 benchmarked - The arrival of a new GPU king

Qualcomm has finally taken the wraps off the Snapdragon 805 SoC. The Snapdragon 805 is the mobile industry’s last great hurrah for the aging 32-bit ARMv7 architecture, and also Qualcomm’s Krait CPU swan song. From this point on, it’s going to be 64-bit ARMv8 all the way. Truth be told, though, the Snapdragon 805 isn’t really about the CPU at all — much more importantly, it’s the vehicle for the introduction of the new and incredibly powerful Adreno 420 GPU (OpenGL ES 3.1, Direct3D 11.2, OpenCL 1.2), and some new buses and other logic blocks that allow for 4K display and 4K video capture. Just how powerful is the Snapdragon 805? Read on for more details and benchmarks. First, it’s important to note that on the CPU side of things, the Snapdragon 805′s quad-core Krait 450 is only a tiny upgrade over the Snapdragon 801′s quad-core Krait 400. In the past, Qualcomm has tweaked the Krait architecture a few times to provide higher clock speeds and IPCs (instructions per clock), but in this case all we get is a slightly higher max frequency (2.7GHz vs. 2.5GHz). In benchmarks, you might get 5% higher CPU performance from the Snapdragon 805, but it’s negligible.

Snapdragon 805 CPU performance. About 8% faster than the Snapdragon 801 (due to higher max CPU frequency), but still beaten out by Apple’s new Cyclone core. [Image credit: Anandtech]

Things get a little more exciting on the GPU side. The Adreno 420 is a brand new GPU, offering around a 40% increase in graphics performance over the Snapdragon 801′s Adreno 330 (found in all the current superphones, including the One M8, Galaxy S5, and Xperia Z2). We haven’t been allowed to benchmark power consumption yet, but Qualcomm’s own internal figures say it should be 20% lower. In testing, that 40% bump — in reality, anywhere between 0% and 50% depending on the benchmark — puts the Snapdragon 805 way ahead of anything else on the market. Beyond raw performance, the Adreno 400 series supports OpenGL ES 3.1, Direct3D 11.2 (with a hardware tessellation engine), and OpenCL 1.2.

Adreno 420 GPU performance [Anandtech again]

As a quick aside, it’s worth pointing out that these benchmarks come from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 Mobile Development Platform (MDP). The MDP is a fairly beefy tablet, and for now Qualcomm is only letting journalists use it while plugged into mains power. Final performance figures, especially in smartphone form factors, will be lower (but not massively so).

Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 Mobile Development Platform (MDP)

To support the beefy GPU, there’s also a new memory interface, supporting two 1600MHz 64-bit DDR3 channels (4×32-bit), for a total peak bandwidth of 25.6 gigabytes per second. Qualcomm says this is the highest memory bandwidth for a mobile device. The wider memory bus is probably necessary to drive 4K graphics — not that there are any smartphones or tablets with 4K displays, mind you. While we’re on the topic of 4K, the Snapdragon 805 also introduces a hardware H.265/HEVC decoder (but no encoder), and a new, faster ISP (image signal processor) that supports 4K @ 30 fps video recording. For the most part, the Snapdragon 805 will be seen as an incremental and niche upgrade. While the Adreno 420 is impressive, it only really comes into its own at higher-than-1080p resolutions — and while mobile devices are surely going in that direction, it looks like 2014′s flagship devices will be sticking at 1080p, where the Snapdragon 801 SoC with Adreno 330 GPU do just fine. In this light, the Snapdragon 805 is more of a tech demo for the full roll-out of the Adreno 400-series GPU next year, starting with the 64-bit Snapdragon 808 and 810 SoCs. The 808 and 810 will also step down from 28nm to 20nm, which should result in an even larger performance boost and power drop compared to the current Snapdragons. And of course, the 808 and 810 are themselves just setting the stage for 2015′s main act: Qualcomm’s custom-designed 64-bit successor to Krait. With the Adreno 420 posting some seriously impressive numbers, and assuming Krait’s CPU successor is equally beastly, I have a good feeling that Qualcomm’s domination of the mobile market will continue.