Snapdragon 820 Promises Astounding 50% Performance Increase

Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon 820 CPU which supposedly offers up to twice the battery life and performance compared to the widely used, Snapdragon 810. The Snapdragon 810 is a modified version of the ARM Cortex A7 containing A53 CPU cores to support 64-bit ARMv8 technology across a range of premium handsets. While the 820 isn’t set for a retail release any time soon, it’s a remarkable improvement and could revolutionize battery life. Personally, this is imperative as users shouldn’t have to charge their exceedingly expensive handset on a daily basis.

Additionally, the 820 features a maximum frequency of 2.2GHz and manufactured on the 14nm FinFET process. This is a complete custom chip and the architecture improvements on 14nm FinFET should create a much more efficient mobile CPU. For example, Qualcomm is claiming the chip is capable of up to 50% improvements whilst utilizing half the power draw of the Snapdragon 810. Of course, this explains why there is a huge difference in battery life. Although, it’s important to reiterate the term, “from”, which means 50% could become a rarity. I’m hopeful we will see performance gains between 40-50% on a regular basis, but only time will tell.

The Snapdragon 820 is expected to release early in 2015 and should become the CPU choice for the latest flagship handsets. As new production lines are matured, mobile CPUs should become faster, more efficient and significantly enhance battery life across all price points.

Thank you Ars Technica for providing us with this information.