Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Officially Announced

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and 808 are the company’s high-end SoC’s for this year, however, things have not gone smoothly for the chip maker. The Snapdragon 810 especially was problematic as it was aimed at high-end flagship smartphones, but because of its over-heating, it wasn’t successful. Even the Snapdragon 808 didn’t succeed much because it was not much of an improvement over the old 800-series chips.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and Adreno 500 GPUs announced

Now Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 820 chip, which will come with a new generation of Adreno 500 GPUs. The Snapdragon 820 will come with the high-end Adreno 530, while the 618 and 620 both will come with the Adreno 510. All the 500-series GPUs will support OpenGL ES 3.1 with the Android Extension Pack, which was introduced in Android Lollipop.

As per Qualcomm, the new Adreno 530 improves performance by roughly 40% while also reducing the power consumption by 40%, compared to the earlier Adreno 430 GPU. The Adreno 510, which will ship with the 618 and 620, will also be 40% more faster and 40% more power efficient although the company has given no exact figures.

The Snapdragon 820 will support the HDMI 2.0 standard, which will provide the required bandwidth to connect an external 4k display at 60 frames per second. The 820 will also support Spectra ISP, which means support for a dual rear camera setup like the one in the HTC One M8. It combines the images from each camera to simulate an increased depth of field. Also this ISP will use the data to simulate optical zoom for better images.

For now, we don’t know when we will be able to see phones with the Snapdragon 820 chip, but it probably won’t be soon. We expect such devices not to ship until next year, and hopefully Qualcomm will fix the over-heating issue.

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