Full specs leak for Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 820 SoC

The Snapdragon 820 has been frequently discussed during the past few months. After the major overheating scandal that engulfed the Snapdragon 810 and definitely took its toll on Qualcomm's standing in the mobile industry as a whole, the company is needs to do some major damage control with its next generation of chips.

A lot is riding on the Snapdragon 820 and its success, which has left the industry anxious to know more about the silicon. A few rather interesting slides have been unearthed form a presentation on the Snapdragon 820, more specifically its MSM8996 version. They are quite thorough in describing the new technologies employed in the high-end Snapdragon. Most of the information aligns with what we have previously heard so it has a high chance of being the real thing.

The Snapdragon 820 will use a 14nm FinFet manufacturing process, to catch up to Samsung's Exynos 7420. More importantly, Qualcomm has once again ditched the stock ARM cores and designed a custom architecture - we previously believed it would be called Kryo, yet the document at hand refers to it as Hydra. Perhaps the return to custom cores is exactly what the doctor prescribed to the ailing company.

Apparently Qualcomm is so confident in Hydra that it is cutting down the number of cores to four, instead of the eight found in the Snapdragon 810, which it promises will still deliver a whopping 35% performance improvement. This is coupled with a new Adreno 530 GPU, which accounts for an additional 40% improvement in the graphics department, as well as 30% better power efficiency.

The Snapdragon 820 will support dual-channel LPDDR4 memory with speeds of up to 1688 Mhz. Camera capabilities have also been greatly improved. The new chip can handle up to 28MP cameras now with programmable preprocessing and post-processing DSP, which will give manufacturers an even greater level of control.

Naturally, the rapid advancements in multimedia have been reflected in the hardware as well. The MSM8996 will come fully prepared to handle 4K videos at 60fps. Another interesting new addition is a dedicated low-powered sensor for handling "emerging always on cases".

The timeline says that Snapdragon 820 will see the light of day around the end of 2015. However, this most-likely refers to initial shipments to OEMs, meaning we can realistically expect the first batch of flagship phones and tablets with a Snapdragon 820 SoC to appear in Q1 2016.

Source (in Chinese) | Via