We have ranked Qualcomm Snapdragon smartphone CPUs to help you choose better

AmarendraJuly 9, 2017

3 34 minutes read

One of the key factors that determine a phone purchase is the CPU and GPU. In smartphones, the chipset contains CPU, GPU, LTE(4G), RAM etc. One such chipset brand is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Snapdragon is popular choice among smartphone makers. There are lot of variants of Snapdragon chips. In this page, you get to know which chipset is better and which one better suites your needs. Also, do not miss our “Recommended Smartphones” list that contains best smartphones for every budget.

CPU

Every smartphone chip maker uses ARM designed CPUs. They license the design from ARM, apply their modifications, package with other modules like LTE, ISP, DSP, wireless, GPU etc. ARM basically makes three versions of CPUs. 3 series (eg: Cortex A32) is meant to be used alongside better cores in big.LITTLE (4x faster cpus and 4x 3 series CPUs, packaged as octa core CPU). 5 series can be used as standalone cores or used alongside performance oriented 7 series cores in big.LITTLE setup.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon are currently the best available chipsets for smartphones, comparable only to the Apple A series chips that are used in iPhone. If you see chips like Snapragon 630, there are four A72 cpus and four A53 cpus. When there is heavy load involved, A72 CPUs take control of execution otherwide A53 chips take control. This way, the phone will consumer less battery life and generate less heat most of the time. For chips like Snapdragon 835 which requires heavy performance (to drive 4K display, resource intensive games, external display etc), Qualcomm has used eight top of the line Kryo CPUs (based on ARM Cortex A72) and these cores go up to 2.45GHz, delivering massive performance.

GPU

Unlike CPU comparison, it is very hard to compare GPUs of one brand with those of another brand. Qualcomm uses in-house designed Adreno GPUs in Snapdragon chips. Qualcomm acquired Imageon from AMD (designed by ATI) in 2009 and renamed the products to Adreno. Since then, Adreno has near monopoly in smartphone GPU market. Unlike ARM, Qualcomm does not license their designs so any OEM who need GPU/CPU will have to buy from Qualcomm.

RAM

While LPDDR4 RAM is commonly used, we are now seeing phones with LPDDR4X RAMs which are much much faster and efficient when compared to older LPDDR3.

Fab Process (5nm, 7nm, 8nm, 14nm etc)

Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to create the integrated circuits that are present in everyday electrical and electronic devices. It is a multiple-step sequence of photo lithographic and chemical processing steps during which electronic circuits are gradually created on a wafer made of pure semiconducting material. Silicon is almost always used, but various compound semiconductors are used for specialized applications. -Wikipedia

CPUs and GPUs are filled with millions and millions of transistors. In chips, these function more like gates switching on and off, to allow electrons pass. In manufacturing plant, multiple chips are made out of single wafer of silicon. The nm figure that you see in specifications (14nm, 28nm etc) is the size of this transistor. When a company says that their chip is designed on 14nm fabrication process, in layman’s terms, it means that the size of the transistor/gate is 14nm. When the transistor size is reduced, there are various advantages. Electrons travel less distance and this improves efficiency and speed. Transistors require less power to turn on and this reduces amount of power required. As a result, there will be noticeable increase in processing power. Also, with smaller transistor size, the size of cpu decreases allowing phone makers to have more space for other components. For example, the battery can be bigger, niche features can be added, phone can be thinner.

Yield rate increases as manufacturing plants move to lower fabrication process. Take a scenario where the transistors are so big that you can only create two processors from a wafer. If one of these two processor is faulty, the yield rate for the wafer is just 50%. Shrink the size of transistor and now you can create 10 processor from the same wafer. If one is faulty ,the yield rate will be 90%. Now, create 100 processors from same wafer and if 1 is faulty, you have a yield rate of 99%. A smaller fabrication processor not only improves performance and power efficiency, it also lets chip manufacturing companies have higher yield rate, faster production and higher revenue.

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