Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865+: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold
Today Qualcomm is announcing an update to its extremely successful Snapdragon 865 SoC: the new Snapdragon 865+. The Snapdragon 865 had already seen tremendous success with over 140 different design wins, powering some of the best Android smartphone devices this year. We're past the hectic spring release cycle of devices, and much like last year with the S855+, for the summer and autumn release cycle, Qualcomm is providing vendors with the option for a higher-performance binned variant of the chip, the new S865+. As a bit of a[n] arbitrary, but also important characteristic of the new chip is that this is the first ever mobile silicon to finally pass the 3GHz frequency mark.
[...] Whilst in relative terms the new chipset's +10% clock improvement isn't all that earth-shattering, in absolute terms it finally allows the new Snapdragon 865+ to be the first mobile SoC to break past the 3GHz threshold, slightly exceeding that mark at a peak 3.1GHz frequency. Ever since the Cortex-A75 generation we've seen Arm make claims about their CPU microarchitectures achieving such high clock frequencies – however in all those years actual silicon products by vendors never really managed to quite get that close in commercial mass-production designs.
We've had a chat with Qualcomm's SVP and GM of mobile business Alex Katouzian, about how Qualcomm achieved this, and fundamentally it's a combination of aggressive physical design of the product as well as improving manufacturing yields during the product's lifecycle. Katouzian explained that they would have been able to achieve these frequencies on the vanilla Snapdragon 865 – but they would have had a lower quantity of products being able to meet this mark due to manufacturing variations. Yield improvements during the lifecycle of the Snapdragon 865 means that the company is able to offer this higher frequency variant now.
This feat should become more common with the arrival of Cortex-X1 ARM cores and the "5nm" and below process nodes.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday July 09 2020, @02:23AM (2 children)
There are a handful of gaming-oriented phones with fans/exhaust:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/29/18522625/nubia-red-magic-3-gaming-phone-release-date-cooling-price-specs-features [theverge.com]
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/red-magic-5g-gaming-smartphone-has-144hz-display-internal-cooling-fan/ [arstechnica.com]
But 3 GHz was just inevitable. The same advancements that helped desktop CPUs creep up to 5 GHz and up have helped ARM phone SoCs reach 3 GHz. If new materials and packaging come into play, the clock speeds will be pushed even higher.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday July 09 2020, @02:50AM (1 child)
Not a gamer but if there's a market for a 'gaming-phone'...
I'd just expect high performance Snapdragons in a larger enclosure with marginally better heat dissipation such as a Chromebook or Windows tablet.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 09 2020, @03:01AM
Qualcomm makes Snapdragon 8cx, 8c, and 7c and variants for those form factors.
Qualcomm Tech Summit, Day 3: Snapdragon 8cx, the New ACPC SoC [anandtech.com]
Faster Snapdragon 8cx for Windows 10 PCs Reportedly in the Works – Could Break the 3.00GHz Frequency Barrier [wccftech.com]
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/12/07/2322222 [soylentnews.org]
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/12/09/0052233 [soylentnews.org]
The devices containing these SoCs have been overpriced, and x86 software dominance is a problem. Microsoft will supposedly emulate x64 on ARM next year.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]