Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 850, Explicitly Aimed at New PCs
Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 850, with a focus explicitly on PC performance rather than smartphone or tablet performance that one would typically expect. This focus sets the Snapdragon 850 apart from devices like the Snapdragon 835. While that SoC has been used in the first round of Always Connected PCs to use ARM hardware, it was still primarily a phone product. The Snapdragon 850, in contrast, is meant to be used for PCs first.
Unlike the Snapdragon 835 to 845 shift, there’s no fundamental change to the underlying CPU architecture or capability. The Snapdragon 845 uses two quad core configurations: A Cortex-A75 (branded as the Kryo 385 Gold) cluster clocked at up to 2.8GHz and a quad-core Cortex-A55 cluster (branded as the Kryo 385 Silver) clocked at 1.77GHz. The Snapdragon 850 uses the exact same core configuration, but increases the maximum clock to 2.95GHz on the high-end cluster, with an unknown maximum clock on the smaller cores.
Now, the increase of +150MHz Turbo on the larger cores may not seem like much, but remember, the systems we’ve seen in-market thus far are all based on the Snapdragon 835. That SoC had two sets of quad-cores as well, all based on the Cortex-A73 architecture, and all of them clocked at lower frequencies (Kryo 280 Gold @ 2.45GHz, Kryo 280 Silver @ 1.9GHz). Compared with the Snapdragon 835, then, the Snapdragon 850 offers a straight-line maximum clock increase of roughly 20 percent, on top of the architectural improvements from moving to the Snapdragon 845 / Cortex-A75 architecture. Qualcomm projects a 30 percent increase in CPU and GPU performance, which seems entirely reasonable in both cases given what we know about the platform and underlying CPU architectures. The GPU architecture also gets a bump, from the Adreno 540 to 630 family, though it’s a little less clear what this entails.
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