News: What can do Snapdragon 800

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800: Hands-on with the Future of Mobile

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When Qualcomm first announced that its next-generation Snapdragon 800 series processors would run at a maximum clock speed of 2.3-GHz, we were instantly blown away. After all, that would make the chip one of the fastest in the land. But the Snapdragon 800 is more than just a speed demon. This processor also packs a wide array of impressive features that sound too good to be true, including the ability to capture and output 4K photos and videos, run high-quality games, play 7.1 Dolby audio and enable 4G LTE Advanced connectivity. To get a closer look at this processing behemoth, we stopped by Qualcomm’s booth here at Mobile World Congress 2013 to see what the future of mobile tech holds.

4K Video Capture and Playback

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The tech buzzword, er, phrase, of the moment is “4K resolution.” TV manufacturers ranging from LG to Samsung are all working on their own 4K TVs sporting the latest in super sharp, high definition technology. At four times the pixel density of a standard 1080p display, 4K images and videos require serious horsepower to run smoothly. And yet somehow Qualcomm has managed to get its Snapdragon 800 to do just that.

Not only that, but the chip is also capable of capturing video and images in 4K and outputting them to a 4K display via HDMI. During one demo, Qualcomm representatives showed us a clip from the film “Life of Pi” in 4K resolution running off of a Snapdragon 800-powered Android tablet, and at no point did we notice any lag. During a second demonstration, we used a Snapdragon 800-equipped phone to capture 4K pictures of a Qualcomm representative and immediately transfer them to a 4K television.

Carrier Aggregation

Next we checked out the processor’s ability to run a 4G LTE Advanced data connection. Such data speeds, which can reach as high as 145 Mbps, are possible as a result of a technique Qualcomm is using called carrier aggregation, which combines a carrier’s radio channels across non-adjacent bands.

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So what can a 145 Mbps data connection do for you? How about stream 4K resolution video as Qualcomm did during our demo? Qualcomm says it’s not just making changes to its chipset to bring users such high data speeds, the chip-maker is also working with carriers to improve their networks efficiently and bring LTE Advanced to market in the not-too-distant future.

Mobile Gaming Powerhouse

Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t check out how well the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 can handle mobile gaming. So we stopped by the company’s gaming kiosk where we saw the Snapdragon 800 running three games, including the Android game “Modern Combat.”

What really blew our socks off was the number of polygons the processor was able to handle while running a game demo of a group of dragons attacking a castle. At one point during the demo the lead dragon spits out a stream of fire that, when viewing the game as a collection of wire frames, turned into a seemingly infinite number of polygons.

After spending some time with the Snapdragon 800, it’s clear that Qualcomm’s next-generation chip is destined to be one of the most important pieces of silicon in the coming years. From 4K resolution and 7.1 Dolby sound to incredible network speeds and gaming power, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor is in a category all its own.

NVIDIA Hates The Benchmark Game, But Lifts The Veil On Tegra 4 Performance Anyway

Flash back a month or so to CES — NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang officially pulled back the curtain on the company’s new Tegra 4 chipset, and called it the “world’s fastest mobile processor.” It was a hell of a claim to make, but the company did little to justify it at the time aside from pointing to its array of Cortex A15 CPU cores and its “72 GPU cores.”

Fortunately, NVIDIA is much chattier here at MWC, and was eager to show off some rather impressive synthetic benchmarks for its latest and greatest mobile chipset.

Well, maybe “eager” isn’t exactly the right word — NVIDIA really hates playing the mobile benchmark game. I don’t blame them. In many ways the sorts of numbers that these tests spit out just don’t accurately reflect the experience that users will actually have. During our early testing for instance, the Nexus 4 consistently put up some strangely anemic Quadrant scores — which its cousin the Optimus G handily blew past — despite working like a dream.

All that said, benchmarks are largely are for the most part inescapable, and the Tegra 4 SoC does a rather nice job on them anyway. Quadrant is one of our go-to mobile benchmarking tools, and the Tegra 4 did not disappoint — it scored in the mid-16,000s, topping out at 16,591. To put that in a little perspective, Samsung/Google’s Nexus 10 (which itself is powered by a relatively new dual-core 1.7 GHz Samsung Exynos chipset) usually scores in the mid-to-high 4,000s. Asus’ Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 (powered by a 1.6GHz quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3) fared about the same, if not a hair higher.

The results were much the same when we looked at AnTuTu scores — while tablets like the Nexus 10 and Asus’ TF700 will yield scores in the mid-8000s to low-9000s, the Tegra 4 demo tablet consistently hit scores above 36,000.

Curious about how the Tegra 4 compares in your preferred benchmarking suite? You can see the full gallery of Tegra 4 benchmark results below:

One of NVIDIA’s most prominent competitors these days is Qualcomm, and NVIDIA Product Marketing director Matt Wuebbling was eager to chat about the performance differential when I let slip the Q word. 

When asked about how much NVIDIA knows about Qualcomm’s updated Snapdragon chipsets, he replied simply enough: “we know a lot.” By his count, the Tegra 4 is about two to three times faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 (used in devices like the new HTC One). He went on to say that the top-tier Snapdragon 800 is about 25 to 35 percent faster than the 600, with the implication that the Tegra 4 still comes out on top. 

Though his response has based on Qualcomm’s published Snapdragon claims, I’d still advise you to take that comparison with a grain of salt. That’s nothing against Wuebbling, but these sorts of simple comparisons don’t always paint the most accurate picture. I couldn’t reach Qualcomm for response at time of writing, but I’ll update if/when they respond to these claims.

You would think that this sort of horsepower would suck a battery dry in jiffy, but that doesn’t appear to the be the case. Another Tegra 4 demo had a video running at full resolution on a small 1080p display, an exercise that never drew more 1 watt of electricity at the most. Power consumption typically fell within the 900-950 milliwatt range — devices like the Droid DNA for instance tend to draw around 1.2 watts for similar tasks.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 theater demo at MWC 2013

The false alarm of the super powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 already being in a device, and a ZTE one of all places already rang at MWC, but reality is we are still a few months away from seeing retail devices with the most powerful Snapdragon chip so far.

Being at Mobile World Congress, though, we were privileged to get an early peek at a reference tablet design based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 and running a 4K Ultra HD video.

All of that happened at the Qualcomm Theater booth where only 9 people are allowed to sit and enjoy the Snapdragon 800 experience. You also get to listen to 7.1 surround sound augmenting the experience. Take a look below.