Samsung Launches the Galaxy S5 Broadband LTE-A: First Snapdragon 805 Phone, First 20nm Modem
by Joshua Ho on June 19, 2014 10:47 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy S5
While this launch is Korea-only, Samsung recently announced a new version of their Galaxy S5 smartphone, dubbed the Galaxy S5 Broadband LTE-A. Naming aside, this makes this phone the first to launch with APQ8084 and MDM9x35. For those unfamiliar with Snapdragon 805 and MDM9x35, this means that the CPUs are now Krait 450 instead of Krait 400, and the GPU is now Adreno 420 instead of Adreno 330. While the CPU revisions are minor, the GPU is fast enough to have the same level of performance at 1440p as an Adreno 330 at 1080p. The MDM9x35 modem also means that category 6 LTE is supported for speeds of up to 300 Mbps. The MDM9x35 is also the first 20nm SOC part shipping from TSMC, which bodes well for 20nm SoCs in the near future.
Qualcomm also notes that this phone integrates the WTR3925 transceiver, so carrier aggregation is done on a single chip instead of the WTR1625L/WFR1620 dual-chip solution that was previously needed. Samsung also integrated a QHD (2560x1440) OLED display into this model at the same 5.1" display size. The only other difference is that the phone now has 3GB RAM instead of the 2GB present in the international model. Otherwise, the rest of the phone is identical to the international Galaxy S5. It's curious to note that Samsung has chosen to use the 2.5 GHz bin of the APQ8084 line rather than the highest 2.7 GHz bin, although the reasons behind this decision aren't quite clear yet.
Source: Samsung Tomorrow
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RaistlinZ - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
I'm throwing money at my screen but nothing is happening.skiboysteve - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
Hahahasoccerballtux - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
try screaming the specs as loudly as you cannunya112 - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
haha that's funny :)Frenetic Pony - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
I guess that's cool... but it's a small upgrade to an existing phone not have a year old so isn't this Samsung just going "First Post!"lmcd - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
GPU ain't a small upgrade, as the post noted.Gondalf - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
Umm yes and i am not surprised of this. I my knowledge just now Adreno 330 throttles down all the time of around 30% under a sustained workload. The most laughable Qualcomm claim is a 20% power reduction on Adreno 420 vs. 330. Obviousy it is only marketing because the process is the same (28nm) and all the available tricks to reduce the power consumption are already widely adopted in the older Mali GPUs. It's funny but Qualcomm is the only Company around the world for which the laws of physics are not valid. Another boring throttle festival for brainless customers.It is strange that Anandtech do not stress the top tier phones with a sustained GPU bench to reveal all the weakness of these absurd tablet thinked SOCs. But it is strange for real???? or site contacts numbers are more relevant......
UpSpin - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
You said:"Obviousy it is only marketing because the process is the same (28nm) and all the available tricks to reduce the power consumption are already widely adopted in the older Mali GPUs."
So according to you, there are no ways to further increase the efficiency without changing the process?
So according to you there's no reason to do further research in GPUs, because they are as efficient as possible, and all they have to do is wait for TMSC or others until they finalized a smaller process?
That's wrong. I don't have a link for GPUs, but an article about the improvements of Cortex A9 revisions: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6787/nvidia-tegra-4-...
pepone1234 - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
And he is also forgetting the nvidia maxwell example.Gondalf - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
Maxwell example is only a larger utilization of very common techniques in mobile CPUs/GPUs. Here the topic is not an high power GPU for Pcs but some just now heavily optimized IP blocks for handset SOCs. With Maxwell Nvidia has only done what he had not yet done, hoping for a faster node shrink.