Snapdragon 820 benchmarked, close to Exynos 7420 performance

Apple caught out Qualcomm with a 64-bit chipset and in its rush to launch one of its own the Snapdragon chipmaker produced a troubled chipset, the Snapdragon 810. It's replacement is coming, the 820, which will go back to custom-designed cores instead of using stock ones from ARM like the S810 and Samsung's Exynos are doing.

The Snapdragon 820 MSM8996 was found in the Geekbench 3 scores database. It ran its four Kryo cores at up to 3GHz and was reportedly built on Samsung's 14nm process, which is the major reason the Exynos 7420 blasts away the Snapdragon 810 even though both use the same CPU design.

Data reported by Geekbench 3, click for full size

Why only four cores when 10-core models are headed to market? Well, this has turned into more of a marketing gimmick, Apple has one of the most powerful chipsets on the market even though they only have two cores. Nvidia's Tegra K1 chipset also uses to very powerful cores.

Qualcomm's custom cores are powerful but have a wide range of frequency scaling (with performance and power usage tied to that), so they can work as either powerful or as low-power cores as needed. Here's the result compared to some recent flagships.

GeekBench 3 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Snapdragon 820 (4x Kryo)
  1732
• Galaxy S6 (4x A57, 4x A53)
  1503

GeekBench 3 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Galaxy S6 (4x A57, 4x A53)
  5242
• Snapdragon 820 (4x Kryo)
  4970
• LG G Flex2 (4x A57, 4x A53)
  3604
• LG G4 (2x A57, 4x A53)
  3522
• HTC Nexus 9 (2x Denver)
  3470
• Apple iPhone 6 (2x Cyclone)
  2924
• Sony Xperia M4 Aqua (8x A53)
  2375

It looks good, especially the single core performance, especially if the chipset runs cool and uses little battery. The multi-core result though is nothing inspiring – Samsung already has it beat and by the time Snapdragon 820 devices are out, the Galaxy Note 5 will probably have come out with an upgraded Exynos.

By the way, the Snapdragon 820 should bring a new Adreno GPU along too – with QHD screens the norm, a good GPU is needed more than a many-core processor. Geekbench doesn’t test graphics though, so we'll have to wait some more.

Source (in Chinese) | Via