Still using 28nm for the SD 653 is just wrong. But hey they gotta gimp their midrange somehow since their Kryo cores are so weak. 4xA53's @ 2ghz and 2XA73's @ 2ghz built on 14/16nm would be a killer midrange SoC.
Exactly. Considering that the HiSilicon Kirin 950/955 is more than competitive with the 820/821, I'd say Qualcomm is using their massive market share to sell their own custom cores rather than A72s purely out of prestige/not wanting to admit failure. Especially after the fiascos that were the 808 and 810, The 82X series seems like a "look, we're not using those cores that underperformed last year" play from Qualcomm. A 650 series on 14nm with a proper GPU would be very, very competitive with the 82X series. The problem with that is that it would give buyers a more direct comparison in terms of price v. performance compared to other chipmakers. And Qualcomm sure doesn't want that.
Since A35 is targeted towards ultra-high efficiency it is likely that QC doesn't want to compromise performance even in the midrange. I think if vendors really want to go deca-core, 4x A35 + 4x A53 + 2x A73 would be the way to go.
The a35,iirc, is the replacement for the a7, which is plenty fast enough to keep the system responsive while the big cores are hotplugged. The a53's, OTOH, have just been abused. The only phones they should be the primary cores in are budget models.
Not sure that's the case. I'm sure I've seen charts showing Ax cores to be more powerful, but not more efficient than A72 -- at least when normalised for manufacturing process.
That's as close to a same process comparison as you're going to get. You can assert that the A72 uses less energy to get that score, but there's little evidence for that. The Mate 8 lasts a long time on a battery, but also has a HUGE battery --- no-one's claiming that it has some sort of "life/battery size" that is above average.
Presumably in a few days we'll see the Kirin 960 sporting A73 cores, built on TSMC 16FF+. But I suspect its performance relative to the A10 will be somewhat worse than the A72:A9 ratio.
28nm is still in use because it's cheap. You have to remember that the 6xx and 4xx lines compete with Mediatek so every cent counts. A 14nm SD 653 would be a flagship killer with long battery life. Maybe that's another reason Qualcomm are still using 28nm.
It's just a cost thing really. 28nm is dirt cheap.
But Samsung are now making 14nm mid-range SoCs and IIRC even low-end SoCs, because they're overcome some of the initial high-cost issues with 14nm. And they've noticed Qualcomm staying on 28nm, so they could win some business from them.
A Quad-A73 at 2.4GHz with a Quad-A35 would be a devastating value proposition on 14nm.
So for the third year in a row, much of the entry level and lower-midrange SoCs will iterate on the slow A53 cores. How exciting. Why do we even need eight identical "big-little" A53 cores on an entry level smartphone or tablet?
8x A53 is just dumb, just like 8x A7 made for good headlines and synthetic benchmark scores but meant little in the real world. That said, there's nothing wrong about using A53 cores or their A35 successors for typical tasks with A72s as boost cores. The Snapdragon 650/652 punch well above their own weight thanks to those A72 cores speeding things up when needed, while the A53s sip power most of the time.
My Galaxy A9 Pro just did 3d 7h 37m 35s on battery, with 10% left to go. I took a screen shot in disbelief. And before anyone says I didn't use my phone - I just returned from Asia to Europe, after nearly a year, and had many calls to do.
Thats a 652 chip for you. (oh but my battery is 5000mAh)
My point was, this 28nm HPE, or whatever it is, is clearly working, so why would they NOT use it for midrange devices? I imagine all the FinFET lithography lines are well-busy just now.
If there is an A10 Pro, I'm gonna be all over that.
I've got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 with the 650 and a 4000 mAh battery and I usually get 10 hours screen on time. That's usually two days of emails, chat, music and browsing. No Pokémon Go though.
The 650 and 652 are amazing chips because they're so cheap while still giving good performance. I think Qualcomm are waiting for 14nm processes to get cheaper and more efficient before switching over.
Um 8xA53/A7 are not dumb and it does more then just look good on benchmarks. I have done several experiments with these types of phones. I turned two and 4 of the cores off to see the effect it would have on performance. (switching between the big and little clusters) and saw big performance drops in real world use games,web,texting so the argument that a smart phone or computer does not get any benefit from using more then 4 cores at the same time is bullcrap.
SD 652 is a great chip. My Le Eco 2 beats Note 5(Exynos 7420) in terms of sheer speed. Remember, Note 5 was released late 2015 and received great reviews even in 2016. The only reason Qualcomm didn't want it to be on 14 nm is it didn't want 652 cores eclipsing SD 820.
Because Kryo cores aren't doing well in performance-efficiency comparisons. The A72 is a very good core when you need fast bursts of high performance.
Come to think of it, the SD 65x chips look like quick hacks that turned out to be surprisingly good. The A53 and A72 cores are stock ARM designs, the GPU is a midrange Adreno, modem speeds aren't at the top, memory speed and bandwidth are constrained compared to the 82x chips - but the whole combination is good enough for most users. I'd rather have 80% of a flagship's performance while getting double the battery life.
SD808 was never meant for true flagships as dual A57 couldn't keep up with the quad A57 in 7420 and definitely not the dual Twister in A9. The only reason it was competitive with the 810 is because the 810 couldn't keep its A57 running for long. Also, the 652 actually should offer better performance than the 808 because the quad A72 brings not only double the cores but also an IPC increase while maintaining the clock speed.
Most mobile phone makers are just spamming ram, i.e. 8GB. Seriously, I am not sure if there is a need to even have that much ram on the mobile phone. This is a case of trying very hard to differentiate. Also, the race to increase ram will quickly make Android a very memory hungry OS since there is plenty of ram to use. Older phones with even 3/4GB may start struggling to keep up.
You understand it's the maximum supported by the CPU, right? A desktop Core i5 can have up to 64 GB of RAM. Most users will use it with 4-16 GB and that's fine.
How much power does high speed DDR4 RAM use when idle? Maybe it's better to have 2 or 3 GB that's always in use compared to 6-8 GB that lie idle most of the time. Android's design means most apps save state and reload when necessary, relying on lightweight background services instead of keeping the entire program in memory like on desktop OSes.
Funnily enough, I can run more simultaneous apps and desktop programs on a Windows tablet than an Android device having the same amount of RAM. That's down to Windows having swap whereas Android tries to keep everything in RAM.
The difference in power consumption between 2 and 4 GB RAM is not significant. It's mainly the number of RAM chips defining the consumption. They are just using higher density chips instead of more chips.
You are forgetting something. Total power consumed by smartphone is greatly influenced by Display. If they make 14nm 653 the battery will be smaller and really a flagship killer. As it is now it can be dirt cheap but the phone cannot get thin enough without having horrible battery life.
So doing like this they can offer cheap performance without attacking 820/821.
On the other hand Xiaomi Mi5s is less than 400 USD so if you really consider buying the real thing there are cheap alternative.
I think what they are doing is correct.
On the other hand Mediatek X10 has horrible GPU so there is no real competition at midrange. At high end there is no danger from Mediatek due to only 2 A72 cores , and the real competition si from Samsung and Kyrin but Exynos and Kyrin are not meant to be sold to OEM.
So Quacomm if you really think about them are in very very safe position (kind of Intel vs AMD), at least for now.
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SquarePeg - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Still using 28nm for the SD 653 is just wrong. But hey they gotta gimp their midrange somehow since their Kryo cores are so weak. 4xA53's @ 2ghz and 2XA73's @ 2ghz built on 14/16nm would be a killer midrange SoC.saratoga4 - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
It really does seem like they're afraid of the A72 embarrassing Kryo. I bet we see a 14 nm version of it as soon as the 820/821 is discontinued.Valantar - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Exactly. Considering that the HiSilicon Kirin 950/955 is more than competitive with the 820/821, I'd say Qualcomm is using their massive market share to sell their own custom cores rather than A72s purely out of prestige/not wanting to admit failure. Especially after the fiascos that were the 808 and 810, The 82X series seems like a "look, we're not using those cores that underperformed last year" play from Qualcomm. A 650 series on 14nm with a proper GPU would be very, very competitive with the 82X series. The problem with that is that it would give buyers a more direct comparison in terms of price v. performance compared to other chipmakers. And Qualcomm sure doesn't want that.0iron - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
4xA35 + 2xA73 would be better for midrange due to smaller die & efficiency. It's almost a year since A35 was announced, but still no new SoC using it.CloudWiz - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Since A35 is targeted towards ultra-high efficiency it is likely that QC doesn't want to compromise performance even in the midrange. I think if vendors really want to go deca-core, 4x A35 + 4x A53 + 2x A73 would be the way to go.tuxRoller - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
The a35,iirc, is the replacement for the a7, which is plenty fast enough to keep the system responsive while the big cores are hotplugged.The a53's, OTOH, have just been abused. The only phones they should be the primary cores in are budget models.
tuxRoller - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
The a72 looks to be more efficient than any other arm core**Not designed by Apple
Meteor2 - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Not sure that's the case. I'm sure I've seen charts showing Ax cores to be more powerful, but not more efficient than A72 -- at least when normalised for manufacturing process.name99 - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
On TSMC 16FF, Apple [email protected] gets about 2500 for Geekbench3,Kirin 950 so [email protected] gets about 1700.
http://www.zdnet.com/product/huawei-mate-8/
That's as close to a same process comparison as you're going to get.
You can assert that the A72 uses less energy to get that score, but there's little evidence for that. The Mate 8 lasts a long time on a battery, but also has a HUGE battery --- no-one's claiming that it has some sort of "life/battery size" that is above average.
Presumably in a few days we'll see the Kirin 960 sporting A73 cores, built on TSMC 16FF+. But I suspect its performance relative to the A10 will be somewhat worse than the A72:A9 ratio.
zodiacfml - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Yup. Boring stuff.serendip - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
28nm is still in use because it's cheap. You have to remember that the 6xx and 4xx lines compete with Mediatek so every cent counts. A 14nm SD 653 would be a flagship killer with long battery life. Maybe that's another reason Qualcomm are still using 28nm.psychobriggsy - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
It's just a cost thing really. 28nm is dirt cheap.But Samsung are now making 14nm mid-range SoCs and IIRC even low-end SoCs, because they're overcome some of the initial high-cost issues with 14nm. And they've noticed Qualcomm staying on 28nm, so they could win some business from them.
A Quad-A73 at 2.4GHz with a Quad-A35 would be a devastating value proposition on 14nm.
eek2121 - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
There is a high end smart phone with 8 gigs of RAM? Which one? Not that it matters much, but that's cool.Gunbuster - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Probably a check box "feature" or for use in other embedded devices. Perhaps a router or something using the SoC?UtilityMax - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
So for the third year in a row, much of the entry level and lower-midrange SoCs will iterate on the slow A53 cores. How exciting. Why do we even need eight identical "big-little" A53 cores on an entry level smartphone or tablet?serendip - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
8x A53 is just dumb, just like 8x A7 made for good headlines and synthetic benchmark scores but meant little in the real world. That said, there's nothing wrong about using A53 cores or their A35 successors for typical tasks with A72s as boost cores. The Snapdragon 650/652 punch well above their own weight thanks to those A72 cores speeding things up when needed, while the A53s sip power most of the time.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Indeed.My Galaxy A9 Pro just did 3d 7h 37m 35s on battery, with 10% left to go. I took a screen shot in disbelief. And before anyone says I didn't use my phone - I just returned from Asia to Europe, after nearly a year, and had many calls to do.
Thats a 652 chip for you. (oh but my battery is 5000mAh)
Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Dam, forget no edit available here:My point was, this 28nm HPE, or whatever it is, is clearly working, so why would they NOT use it for midrange devices? I imagine all the FinFET lithography lines are well-busy just now.
If there is an A10 Pro, I'm gonna be all over that.
psychobriggsy - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Well you certainly don't play Pokemon Go :pserendip - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I've got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 with the 650 and a 4000 mAh battery and I usually get 10 hours screen on time. That's usually two days of emails, chat, music and browsing. No Pokémon Go though.The 650 and 652 are amazing chips because they're so cheap while still giving good performance. I think Qualcomm are waiting for 14nm processes to get cheaper and more efficient before switching over.
fred666 - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Indeed, 8x A53 is probably the dumbest configuration possible.saiki4116 - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Moto Z play is 8x A53, it did well in real world usage.Jashuan Turner - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
Um 8xA53/A7 are not dumb and it does more then just look good on benchmarks. I have done several experiments with these types of phones. I turned two and 4 of the cores off to see the effect it would have on performance. (switching between the big and little clusters) and saw big performance drops in real world use games,web,texting so the argument that a smart phone or computer does not get any benefit from using more then 4 cores at the same time is bullcrap.mxnerd - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
So who will make these chips? Samsung or TSMC?azok - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
SD 652 is a great chip. My Le Eco 2 beats Note 5(Exynos 7420) in terms of sheer speed. Remember, Note 5 was released late 2015 and received great reviews even in 2016. The only reason Qualcomm didn't want it to be on 14 nm is it didn't want 652 cores eclipsing SD 820.serendip - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Because Kryo cores aren't doing well in performance-efficiency comparisons. The A72 is a very good core when you need fast bursts of high performance.Come to think of it, the SD 65x chips look like quick hacks that turned out to be surprisingly good. The A53 and A72 cores are stock ARM designs, the GPU is a midrange Adreno, modem speeds aren't at the top, memory speed and bandwidth are constrained compared to the 82x chips - but the whole combination is good enough for most users. I'd rather have 80% of a flagship's performance while getting double the battery life.
azok - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I agree. Performance wise, 652 matches sd 808 which was brought out as an alternative to overheating 810. So last year's biggy is today's mid-range.😀😀CloudWiz - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
SD808 was never meant for true flagships as dual A57 couldn't keep up with the quad A57 in 7420 and definitely not the dual Twister in A9. The only reason it was competitive with the 810 is because the 810 couldn't keep its A57 running for long. Also, the 652 actually should offer better performance than the 808 because the quad A72 brings not only double the cores but also an IPC increase while maintaining the clock speed.watzupken - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Most mobile phone makers are just spamming ram, i.e. 8GB. Seriously, I am not sure if there is a need to even have that much ram on the mobile phone. This is a case of trying very hard to differentiate. Also, the race to increase ram will quickly make Android a very memory hungry OS since there is plenty of ram to use. Older phones with even 3/4GB may start struggling to keep up.fred666 - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
You understand it's the maximum supported by the CPU, right? A desktop Core i5 can have up to 64 GB of RAM. Most users will use it with 4-16 GB and that's fine.serendip - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
How much power does high speed DDR4 RAM use when idle? Maybe it's better to have 2 or 3 GB that's always in use compared to 6-8 GB that lie idle most of the time. Android's design means most apps save state and reload when necessary, relying on lightweight background services instead of keeping the entire program in memory like on desktop OSes.Funnily enough, I can run more simultaneous apps and desktop programs on a Windows tablet than an Android device having the same amount of RAM. That's down to Windows having swap whereas Android tries to keep everything in RAM.
fred666 - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
The difference in power consumption between 2 and 4 GB RAM is not significant. It's mainly the number of RAM chips defining the consumption. They are just using higher density chips instead of more chips.RaduR - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
You are forgetting something. Total power consumed by smartphone is greatly influenced by Display. If they make 14nm 653 the battery will be smaller and really a flagship killer. As it is now it can be dirt cheap but the phone cannot get thin enough without having horrible battery life.So doing like this they can offer cheap performance without attacking 820/821.
On the other hand Xiaomi Mi5s is less than 400 USD so if you really consider buying the real thing there are cheap alternative.
I think what they are doing is correct.
On the other hand Mediatek X10 has horrible GPU so there is no real competition at midrange. At high end there is no danger from Mediatek due to only 2 A72 cores , and the real competition si from Samsung and Kyrin but Exynos and Kyrin are not meant to be sold to OEM.
So Quacomm if you really think about them are in very very safe position (kind of Intel vs AMD), at least for now.
zeeBomb - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
10% performance boost and slightly better modem. Alright Qualcomm...ain't doing much justice here.