Snapdragon 810 Detailed: The Powerhouse Inside 2015's True NEXT-GEN Hardware

Qualcomm have released details of their super high-powered new Snapdragon chip.

We go hands-on with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 to see what it's capable of

Chances are if you’re interested in mobile devices you’re well aware of the Qualcomm name and its line of Snapdragon processors; the company and its chips are pretty much the undisputed masters of the smartphone and tablet space. The likes of the Snapdragon 600, Snapdragon 800, and Snapdragon 805 have already proven themselves in hundreds of thousands of devices shipped in the last few years, and now, as with all things in tech, there is a successor model on the way.

Again, if you follow tech reports you’ve probably already heard of the Snapdragon 810, the next-gen Qualcomm chip has been rumoured to appear inside pretty much every major flagship phone from every major manufacturer, many of which are gearing up for a launch in the next couple of months (HTC One M9, LG G4). With Mobile World Congress (MWC), the expo which will see many of these phones and tablets launched, just around the corner at the beginning of March, Qualcomm saw fit to fly a bunch of journos out to its HQ in San Diego, California, to get to grips with the new silicon. Happily, Know Your Mobile was fortunate enough to tag along.

The emphasis for this hands-on is benchmarking the Snapdragon 810’s performance, but Qualcomm also wanted to showcase the chipset’s unique capabilities for a look past the raw specs and into what it can do for the end user experience. As Qualcomm’s vice president of marketing, Tim McDonough, puts it, “Consumers don’t buy a new phone because it benchmarks 10% faster than their old one, they buy a new phone because it can do things their old phone can’t.” This is why Qualcomm is constantly trying to innovate, and has packed its latest chip with a boatload of capabilities for mobile OEMS (such as Sony, HTC, and others) to take advantage of in their flagship devices.

Low Power, High Speed, More Connections

Something on everyone’s lips for a while now has been the subject of smartphone battery life and power consumption. While it’s true that display technology is often the primary drain on device battery life the next biggest offenders are key processor components and in particular those relating to connectivity and data transfer; namely modems (including LTE and Wi-Fi). As a result, Qualcomm has focused a lot of energy on simultaneously improving its processor and built-in connectivity performance, while at the same time also improving the efficiency and reducing power drain.

Cat 9 LTE

A big push for the Snapdragon 810 is support for Cat 9 LTE; Qualcomm’s reps explained that it has been optimising power efficiency and engaging in carrier aggregation for three generations of its LTE-A modems. Cat 9 supports 3x carrier aggregation of 20MHz at up to 150MBps each with a total maximum 450MBps at 60MHz –– all while integrating every major cellular band for truly global support. What does that mean in real terms? Well it’s 1.5x faster than the previous gen Cat 6 and 3x faster than first-gen Cat 4 LTE-A, while also being 40% more power efficient. The global compatibility also means it’s incredibly easy for device manufacturers and networks to get handsets certified, approved, and rolled out –– faster development time, in other words, because Qualcomm’s hardware is literally a drop-in solution that covers everything in terms of LTE connectivity.

Better RAM & Storage

Qualcomm’s also introducing something of a first with the use of Dual-Channel 1600MHz Low Power DDR4 RAM (LPDDR4) and support for UFS 2.0, essentially meaning faster, more efficient RAM with less battery drain. UFS is Universal Flash Storage and is a next-gen memory solution –– if you’re familiar with SSD memory for PCs it’s pretty much on that level in terms of transfer speeds –– up to about 1.2GB per second. That’s about three times as fast as current eMMC memory used in smartphones and by comparison it sips on the battery.

Hardware 4K Support

The Snapdragon 810 chip includes 4K display and video support at the hardware level, allowing device manufacturers to take full advantage of 4K features. This is the company’s first implementation of hardware-level 4K support and it includes both onboard and external display output, as well as full encode/decode in HEVC and H.256. Qualcomm promises the HEVC encode will deliver 50% improved video compression quality.

Sensors & Audio

Some really interesting and somewhat quirky Snapdragon 810 features showcased by Qualcomm involve the use of sensors. For example, there is hardware support for three microphones built-into the chip, which has some pretty impressive capabilities regarding recording quality and noise cancellation. Qualcomm demonstrated a nifty application which allows a device to quite literally triangulate audio in a set direction, the user can pick where they want sound recording to be isolated to, and it will only pick up that sound - like a classic directional mic. This also has a lot of potential when it comes to voice activation for in-car solutions, and things like better accuracy on Google Now, Cortana, and the like.

This is all assisted by Qualcomm’s low power Hexagon DSP (Digital Signal Processor) which manages the built-in sensors, as well as supporting low power Snapdragon Voice Activation - that means you can get more Motorola Moto X style always-on voice activation without draining the battery. It also supports 12-channel surround sound at a hardware level; meaning that if you’re a film buff with 8.1 surround plus a set of speakers in the ceiling (it’s all the rage, apparently) you’re well and truly sorted).

Camera Trickery

While HTC might have struggled with the implementation of its One M8 dual-camera, Qualcomm’s certainly been paying attention and saw something that it liked. The Snapdragon 810 features a 14-bit Image Signal Processor (ISP) with support for dual-sensors, allowing it to take in and process spatial data for a type of enhanced hybrid optical/digital zoom with no loss of quality up to 10x magnification (we saw this demonstrated on a 13MP dual-sensor setup and it looked far better than anything we’ve seen before bar Nokia’s bulky zoom optics). Like the One M8, this also allows users to re-select a focal point for the image using spatial data. Qualcomm’s hardware supports image sensors up to 21MP and includes advanced phase detect autofocus.

Muscle Power: ARM A-57/A-53 big.LITTLE CPU & Adreno 430 GPU

Of course there’s also the nitty gritty of the SoC in terms of raw processing power. The Snapdragon 810 is based on 20nm, 64-bit semiconductor architecture using ARM’s big.LITTLE octa-core arrangement; it’s a Heterogeneous architecture for better power and efficiency, running four ARM A-57 cores alongside four A-53’s with an Adreno 430 GPU in tow. We could waffle about the technical stuff regarding the GPUs gaming performance but suffice to say it offers console-like graphics thanks to what Qualcomm describes as “dynamic hardware tessellation and geometry shaders”. Here’s a Qualcomm slide to explain:

The Snapdragon 810 reference devices we saw handled gaming and other high-end tasks pretty effortlessly. You can also see from our benchmark tests in GeekBench that performance is boosted over the Snapdragon 801, on multicore tests it scores roughly 30% higher.

Heat: Thermal “Skin Temperature”

Qualcomm’s been in the headlines a fair bit recently owing to rumours about the Snapdragon 810 and some alleged overheating issues. If you were worried about this sort of thing then it’s time to put your mind at rest. Qualcomm showcased how a big chunk of Snapdragon 810 development involved looking at how processor heat impacts performance, and how to alleviate it. Essentially, Qualcomm has established that it doesn’t want temperatures under the heaviest loads to go above 45 degrees celsius on the surface or “skin” of a phone. Here are Qualcomm's own graphs:

The company’s own test results for gaming at 30fps show that the 810’s Heterogeneous architecture actually performs better in terms of heat than the previous gen Snapdragon 800, being well under the 45-degree threshold for a 30 minute play session. The same is true of 4K video capture, being under a target of 40 degrees, and in both cases this is all inside thin test devices of similar proportions to what you’ll currently find on the market. We conducted a few benchmark tests on Qualcomm’s reference devices and you can see the temperature stats during these often graphically intensive sessions in the Vellamo screengrabs below.