Question Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 announced

[DrMrLordX]

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Defines a New Standard for Premium Smartphones

www.qualcomm.com

Key takeaways:

60% perf/Watt AI inferencing boost
25% performance boost from Adreno GPU
40% perf/Watt boost for CPU

There's some other stuff in there but it's curious that they focused on efficiency rather than total performance for AI inferencing and CPU performance. Also apparently Qualcomm pulled the blog post earlier today and then reposted it.

 

[Justinus]

I don't know how many people would agree with this, but I feel like smartphones have reached the point of "fast enough for everything a regular user wants to do", and improving efficiency to reduce heat and improve battery life seems like something sorely lacking at the moment. I'd be happy if phones continued to be about as fast as S8G1, maybe incremental performance improvements every gen, but heavily target efficiency to add hours of battery life every gen instead.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I don't know how many people would agree with this, but I feel like smartphones have reached the point of "fast enough for everything a regular user wants to do", and improving efficiency to reduce heat and improve battery life seems like something sorely lacking at the moment. I'd be happy if phones continued to be about as fast as S8G1, maybe incremental performance improvements every gen, but heavily target efficiency to add hours of battery life every gen instead.

Perhaps you are on to something, but Apple seems to address both fronts.

 

[Justinus]

Perhaps you are on to something, but Apple seems to address both fronts.

Tell that to the new Apple Watch with amazing "all day battery life" (18 hrs) while my samsung watch 4 lasts for 48 hours

 

[Doug S]

Wasn't the previous one made at Samsung? Most of those efficiency gains may be thanks to TSMC.

 

[coercitiv]

I don't know how many people would agree with this, but I feel like smartphones have reached the point of "fast enough for everything a regular user wants to do", and improving efficiency to reduce heat and improve battery life seems like something sorely lacking at the moment. I'd be happy if phones continued to be about as fast as S8G1, maybe incremental performance improvements every gen, but heavily target efficiency to add hours of battery life every gen instead.

At first glance I was tempted to disagree, in the sense that smartphones still have a long way to go in terms of performance. However, If I had to choose between "mostly performance improvements" and "mostly efficiency improvements" then I fully agree with you, I would go for efficiency at this point.

 

[poke01]

Tell that to the new Apple Watch with amazing "all day battery life" (18 hrs) while my samsung watch 4 lasts for 48 hours

All Apple watches use the old 7nm node and efficiency cores from A13.

However, Apple does bring great efficiency in their phones.

 

[maddogmcgee]

I gave up on top tier phones a few years ago. I bought an x3 pro for about 300 AUD 18 months ago. Despite being a few gens old I have not noticed any slowdown on anything with the Snapdragon 860. Battery life is great and photos are good. It has NFC, night mode etc etc. Its also cheap enough I can avoid using a case or screen protector. If it breaks I can just buy something new without being upset.

 

[Nothingness]

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Defines a New Standard for Premium Smartphones

www.qualcomm.com

Key takeaways:

60% perf/Watt AI inferencing boost
25% performance boost from Adreno GPU
40% perf/Watt boost for CPU

There's some other stuff in there but it's curious that they focused on efficiency rather than total performance for AI inferencing and CPU performance. Also apparently Qualcomm pulled the blog post earlier today and then reposted it.

It's here for CPU performance increase: https://www.qualcomm.com/content/da...ocuments/Snapdragon-8-Gen-2-Product-Brief.pdf

Kryo CPU improves performance up to 35%, while new micro-
architecture allows up to 40% more power efficiency

 

[soresu]

Tell that to the new Apple Watch with amazing "all day battery life" (18 hrs) while my samsung watch 4 lasts for 48 hours

tbf neither are stellar.

What happened to Pebble was just sad, with their e-paper displays they were making a mockery of the big name smart watch makers.

 

[soresu]

All Apple watches use the old 7nm node and efficiency cores from A13.

However, Apple does bring great efficiency in their phones.

From what I have seen the peak energy consuming components in smart watches are displays and radios, rather than the processing power which is often far beyond what should be needed for an essentially embedded use case, certainly so in the case of A13 efficiency cores.

Switching to a bi stable reflective LCD, or an electro-phoretic (epaper) display would solve a lot of the display power issues, and the hopefully soon to appear backscatter Wifi could do the same for radios.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Tell that to the new Apple Watch with amazing "all day battery life" (18 hrs) while my samsung watch 4 lasts for 48 hours

It's not that I was fundamentally disagreeing with you, it's just that Apple seems to improve performance and efficiency (usually) with each generation, and they emphasize both.

It's here for CPU performance increase: https://www.qualcomm.com/content/da...ocuments/Snapdragon-8-Gen-2-Product-Brief.pdf

Ah thanks. Should be interesting to see how those claims measure up to third-party testing.

 

[trexfromouterspace]

The big thing here is going back to TSMC after using Samsung the last couple generations.

Samsung's nodes are BAD for Perf/Power. Frankly, the node change probably makes up most if not all of the efficiency improvements Qualcomm is claiming.

 

[FlameTail]

Is Qualcomm still using Kryo (Built on Cortex) cores, which are modified variants of the stock ARM cores like they did back in the day?

 

[Doug S]

All Apple watches use the old 7nm node and efficiency cores from A13.

I guess the inflection between N7 and N5 wafer costs drives up the per chip cost too much for them? At some point they will have to move to a newer node, and the cost inflection between N5 and N3 is much smaller so maybe the Watch will get back on the bleeding edge train? Though maybe not for long, we'll have to see what N2 does to wafer cost.

The Watch might benefit from an even more efficient lower performing core. Apple's little cores would seem to provide far more performance than is necessary. Though honestly, I see no real difference in convenience between a device with one day's battery life or two. Now if they could get battery life to a week, so you only had to charge it weekly, that would make a real difference.

 

[FlameTail]

I wonder what swapping an little core for a medium core bodes for power consumption?

More performance is guaranteed if course, but
it is bad if the power consumption ends up the wall.

 

[lopri]

Samsung-fabbed 8G1 chips are reminiscent of the infamous Snapdragon 810. My phone is S22 and this is likely my last Samsung phone. Qualcomm should stay far away from Samsung until it straightens out whatever issues it's having.

I agree that for phones, efficiency matters more. Problem with Qualcomm and others is that they need to scale their design to address other markets where performance counts more.

Edit: I heard that new Apple Watch Pro has an amazing battery life for a smartwatch. Am I misinformed?

 

[FlameTail]

Edit: I heard that new Apple Watch Pro has an amazing battery life for a smartwatch. Am I misinformed?

Correct me if I am wrong, but there is no such thing as an Apple Watch Pro.

 

[Kaluan]

It's here for CPU performance increase: https://www.qualcomm.com/content/da...ocuments/Snapdragon-8-Gen-2-Product-Brief.pdf

Did I read that right? 1x "prime" core, 4x "big" and 3x "efficiency"?
Departure from 1/3/4 or typo?

 

[lopri]

Apple Watch Ultra, my bad.

 

[FlameTail]

Did I read that right? 1x "prime" core, 4x "big" and 3x "efficiency"?
Departure from 1/3/4 or typo?

Indeed.
1× X3
4× A715
3× A510

I wonder what this bodes for thermals.

I wish CPU vendors would stop chasing raw performance and focused on efficiency.

Imo a 2x X3, 2x A715, 2x A510 configuration with large caches would be a very balanced setup imo. I can imagine Google might take this route in their future Tensor SoCs

 

[DrMrLordX]

Samsung-fabbed 8G1 chips are reminiscent of the infamous Snapdragon 810. My phone is S22 and this is likely my last Samsung phone. Qualcomm should stay far away from Samsung until it straightens out whatever issues it's having.

I currently have an S21 Ultra with a Samsung-fabbed Snapdraqon 888 which has not been as bad as I thought it would be; granted, I'm not doing anything CPU-intensive with it right now, so perhaps that is part of what's making it livable. But during casual use it doesn't have the overheating problems that I remembered seeing in Anandtech's review of the Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100. Tbh my old ROG Phone 2 overheated more often on the same workloads. It exhibited some odd behavior, though.

 

[hemedans]

Samsung-fabbed 8G1 chips are reminiscent of the infamous Snapdragon 810. My phone is S22 and this is likely my last Samsung phone. Qualcomm should stay far away from Samsung until it straightens out whatever issues it's having.

I agree that for phones, efficiency matters more. Problem with Qualcomm and others is that they need to scale their design to address other markets where performance counts more.

Edit: I heard that new Apple Watch Pro has an amazing battery life for a smartwatch. Am I misinformed?

Its true Samsung Fab are not as good Tsmc and its easy to blame Samsung but if you dig deeper Arm is more to blame here due to Cortex X2/A710 and A510 cores.

We have midrange soc with A78 and are manufactured by Samsung like snapdragon 780G, Exynos 1280, 1330, 1380 etc they are just fine for day to day usage. Anandtech did review Sd 780G

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1661...ance-report-first-taste-of-the-snapdragon-780

I just hope by 2023 Phones will get new custom cores from Qualcomm same as Pc. I lost hope in Arm cores.

 

[FlameTail]

Do we have the CPU L2 cache configurations for the SD 8g2?

Forget about 8g2 for the moment, does anybody even know the L2 cache configurations of 8g1 ?

 

[hemedans]

Do we have the CPU L2 cache configurations for the SD 8g2?

Forget about 8g2 for the moment, does anybody even know the L2 cache configurations of 8g1 ?

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Performance Preview: Sizing Up Cortex-X2

www.anandtech.com

Anandtech use to provide these small details, but nowadays information about mobile soc are scarce.