Qualcomm announce SnapDragon 820 flagship chip

2015 is a bad year for Qualcomm. While their top end Snapdragon 810 chip failed due to overheating issues, the midrange and budget chips had to compete with MediaTek chips and we all know who won that battle. Qualcomm has to act fast to regain the control over high end and midrange market. While Snapdragon 620 and 415 indeed look good, all eyes were on Snapdragon 820 announcement.

This week, Qualcomm has finally revealed the much awaited Snapdragon 820 and it is indeed super powerful. The chip that goes into various flagship smartphones, Snapdragon 820 has 64-bit Qualcomm® Kryo™ CPU, Qualcomm® Adreno™ 530 GPU making this chip a strong contender for ‘best SoC crown’ and is ready to fight it out with Samsung’s Exynos 8 Octa.

Similar to the Exynos 8 Octa, Snapdragon 820 has a custom design CPU that is twice as powerful and efficient when compared to the CPU in Snapdragon 810 chip and the Adreno 530 GPU is up to 40% faster than the outgoing Adreno 430 GPU. SD820 can also attain 3x faster peak upload speeds and 33% faster peak download speeds, thanks to X12 LTE chip. The new 14-bit Spectra ISP supports up to 25 megapixel camera.

Qualcomm has also introduced new Symphony System Manager to manage tasks among CPU, GPU, DSP etc. Unlike earlier system manager that could only manage the CPU, the new Symphony manager can manage entire SoC in different configurations to attain efficient and effective combination of modules.

Key Features

• Up to 2.2 GHz quad-core (Quad-core custom 64-bit Qualcomm® Kryo™)
• Qualcomm® Adreno™ 530 GPU
• Qualcomm® Hexagon™ 680 DSP
• Qualcomm® Spectra™ Image Sensor Processor (14-bit dual-ISP)
• Snapdragon X12 LTE with Global Mode
• LTE Cat 12/13 (up to 600 Mbps DL 150 Mbps UL)
• Up to 600 Mbps, 256-QAM DL
• Up to 150 Mbps UL, 64-QAM UL
• Carrier Aggregation : 3x20MHz DL, 2X20MHz UL
• Qualcomm® VIVE™ 802.11ac : 2×2 MU-MIMO, Tri-band Wi-Fi
• Up to 4K Ultra HD capture and playback
• 4K Ultra HD on-device, output, 1080p and 4K external display support
• Qualcomm® Quick Charge™ 3.0
• Qualcomm® WiPower™ wireless charging
• Storage : UFS 2.0, eMMC 5.1, SD 3.0 (UHS-I)
• LP-DDR4 1866MHz dual-channel Memory
• 14nm fabrication
• USB : 3.0, 2.0
• Bluetooth v4.1
• NFC