Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Benchmarking Day

We’ve been hearing about the Snapdragon 800 mobile SoC from Qualcomm since it was initially shown off at CES in January. In January, we got some extremely limited details, but it was clear that this SoC would be a fairly powerful SoC. This came during the same week that Nvidia launched their Tegra 4, which remains to be seen in benchmarks and products. Admittedly, neither the Snapdragon 800 nor the Tegra 4 are shipping any devices right now, however, I do believe that both companies announced too early and some consumers have grown weary of the constant BS being slung around.

With Qualcomm putting the Snapdragon 800 in our hands, we are finally able to validate their own claims while simultaneously verifying or denying the claims of their competitors. Qualcomm is doing something very similar to what they did last year when they put the APQ 8064 in our hands and let us play with the MDP8064. We will once again be playing with Qualcomm’s MDP (mobile developer platform), but this time the device has even more impressive specifications ignoring the upgraded SoC. One notable feature is 4K video capture and the addition of a USB 3.0 port, which makes this tablet the first tablet with USB 3.0.

The Snapdragon 800 is Qualcomm’s latest and greatest offering and will be their flagship SoC for applications. You could also call this thing an APU, which would be accurate as well, however, AMD seems to own that phrase even though they like calling competitor products APUs as well. The Snapdragon 800, like the Snapdragon 600, is an applications processor AND modem solution, which means you get a lot of features in a single piece of silicon. The Snapdragon 800 feature’s Qualcomm’s latest Krait 400 CPU cores as well as their latest Adreno 330 GPU, which Qualcomm claims is 50% faster than it’s predecessor the Adreno 320. The Snapdragon 800 is still a quadcore design, unlike some of their competitors whom have adopted 4+1 and 4+4 core designs in order to reduce the power consumption. In terms of wireless, the Snapdragon is also on the forefront with global 4G LTE with speeds up to 150 Mbps utilizing Carrier Aggregation. The Snapdragon 800 also has 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity, which some of their competitors have decided to give the monniker of 5G Wi-Fi.

Original Author: Anshel Sag