Amidst all the barrage of IFA announcements yesterday, Qualcomm provided more information about the Kryo custom cores that will be found inside its upcoming Snapdragon 820 chipset. Kryo is Qualcomm’s first custom designed 64-bit processor that has been designed to deliver high performance at low power levels. Kryo is based on the 14nm FinFET fabrication process and has been designed to reach speeds of up to 2.2GHz. Qualcomm says that Kryo CPU inside its Snapdragon 820 chipset will be able to deliver up to 2x the performance and 2x the power efficiency when compared to its existing high-end chipset – the Snapdragon 810.
Qualcomm is achieving the increase in power efficiency by using heterogenous processing. To better manage heterogenous processing on the Snapdragon 820, the company is also introducing Symphony Smart System Manager. Using this system manager, Qualcomm will make sure that certain highly processor intensive tasks are offloaded to specialised cores on the Snapdragon 820 to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset, which will also feature an Adreno 530 GPU, a Hexagon 680 DSP, and Spectra ISP, will be making its way inside Android devices from early next year. With Qualcomm delivering a big dud with the Snapdragon 810 chipset this year, the expectations from its upcoming Snapdragon 820 chipset are pretty high. While not much is known about its performance, there has been no leaks or rumors suggesting that the chip is plagued with overheating issues, which after the S810, is a welcome news to hear.
