Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) Performance Preview: Qualcomm Mobile Development Tablet Tested
by Brian Klug on June 18, 2013 8:00 PM ESTFinal Words
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 is quite possibly its most ambitious SoC to date. The goal? To drive absolute performance while maintaining power efficiency. While Snapdragon 600 was clearly about delivering evolutionary gains in performance, Snapdragon 800 intends to compete with ARM's Cortex A15 and Intel's Bay Trail platform.
On the CPU performance front, Snapdragon 800's 2.3GHz Krait 400 cores do appear to hold their own quite well against ARM's Cortex A15. In some cases ARM holds the advantage, while in others the higher clocked Krait 400 takes the lead. We still have the question of power to answer, but Qualcomm bets it can deliver A15-like performance without A15-like power thanks to the 28nm HPM process at its foundry partners.
Qualcomm didn't have any power demos setup, so power analysis and battery life performance will have to come at a later date, but the claim is better performance at equivalent platform power as Snapdragon 600.
On the GPU side, we have a new king. Adreno 330 delivers huge performance improvements over Adreno 320 and everything else we've tested thus far. Snapdragon 800 is the new benchmark to beat. It's very clear to me why many tablet designs scheduled for later this year are based on Snapdragon 800 silicon.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
115 Comments
View All Comments
akbisw - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
YESSS!!! THANK YOU QUALCOMM exactly What I expected!!!Piano Man - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
Nice performance, but the lack of power utilization benchmarks prevents me from breaking out the party favors for the time being.clemsyn - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
I agree, power utilization and heat are very important in mobile. Hope this don't come with a fan :)Xilliox - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
I have been working on this for a long time, trust me, it does not need a fan!FwFred - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
Comparing phones to a tablet is a bit odd. Glad there was a Nexus 10 at least.kcsween - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
You all almost sound like this is Qualcomm's first go at making a mobile processor. I'd find it very hard to believe that they'd not take into consideration power consumption and heat or any other negative factors they considered when they made their other chips. Having said that, all that could be out the door in the race bigger and better, who knows. Guess we all will have to wait and see how this things performs in an actual smartphone.arkhamasylum87 - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
How does this compare to the Ivybridge or Haswell Y series processors in terms of CPU/GPU performance? Would like to see those comparisons. So we can extrapolate how this will compare to a fanless Core product from Intel. The gap is there in terms of connectivity but the perf gaps on CPU/GPU would be interesting to note.teiglin - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
Ivy Y no longer seems interesting to me but for the moment, Haswell 15W (both HD4600/5000) would be super interesting to add to the "great equalizer" page of charts. Doesn't Anand have an Acer with i7-4500U as well as the MBA with i5-4250U? Demand he run some benchmarks for you so you can update those charts. The comparison to i5-3317U made sense against APQ8064T, but 8974's contemporary is Haswell, not Ivy.And when you have Haswell Y samples, those would be neat, too. :)
jeffkro - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link
15W still requires a fan.sna1970 - Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - link
not really,the Haswell can run from 6 watts up to 15 watts.