Following up the piecemeal reveal of it’s Snapdragon 820 chipset, Qualcomm has let loose another bit of information. The leading chipset manufacturer has stated that the custom Kyro cores powering the chipset are twice as power efficient as the ones on the Snapdragon 810 which should come as a relief to most people.
The shift in architecture is instrumental in achieving this. The Kyro cores in the Snapdragon 820 chipset operate on the 14 nanometer FinFET manufacturing process and are a completely customized 64 bit design. This in addition to heterogenous computing enables the lower battery consumption despite being almost twice as powerful. As we’ve detailed earlier, the Snapdragon 820 has a Hexagon 680 DSP, Adreno 530 GPU and a unique imaging processor called Spectra. The chipset is smart enough to delegate responsibilities to specific units and work in tandem with them to distribute tasks and accomplish them faster. This way the processor doesn’t have to stay at peak power mode for long and can save battery. While we won’t expect a straight up 2x improvement in battery life, Qualcomm has done enough work here that we feel that battery life should be substantially better than the much maligned Snapdragon 810 chip. We’ll just have to wait till next year though to find out.
