The Snapdragon 865 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2020
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 16, 2019 7:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- 5G
- Cortex A77
- Snapdragon 865
Final Thoughts
Today’s preview focused solely on the performance metrics of the new chipset, which only cover a very small subset of the new features that the chip will be bringing to devices next year. A lot of the talking-points of the new SoC such as 5G connectivity, or the new camera and media capabilities, are aspects for which we’ll have to wait on commercial devices.
For what we’ve been able to test today, the Snapdragon 865 seems very solid. The new Cortex-A77 CPU does bring larger IPC improvements to the table, and thanks to the Snapdragon 865’s improved memory subsystem, the chip has been able to showcase healthy performance increases. I did find it odd that the web benchmarks didn’t quite perform as well as I had expected – I don’t know if the new microarchitecture just doesn’t improve these workloads as much, or if it might have been a software issue on the QRD865 phone; we’ll have to wait for commercial devices to have a clearer picture of the situation. System performance of the new chip certainly shouldn’t be disappointing, and even on a conservative baseline configuration, 2020 flagships should see an increase in responsiveness compared to the Snapdragon 855.
AI performance of the new chip is also improved – although our limited benchmark suite here isn’t able to fully expose the hardware improvements that the S865 brings with it. It’s likely that first-party camera applications will be the first real workloads that will be able to showcase the new capabilities of the chip.
On the GPU side, the improvements are also quite solid, but I just have a feeling that the narrative here isn’t quite the same anymore for Qualcomm, as Apple’s the elephant in the room now here as well. During the launch of the chipset the company was quite eager to promote that its sustained performance is better than the competition. While we weren’t able to test this aspect of the Snapdragon 865 on the QRD865 due to time constraints, the simple fact is that the chip’s peak performance remains inferior to Apple’s sustained performance, with the fruit company essentially dominating an area where previously Qualcomm was king. In this regard, I hope Qualcomm is able to catch up in the future, as the differences here are seemingly getting bigger each year.
Overall, the Snapdragon 865 seems like a very well-balanced chip and I have no doubt it’ll serve as a very competitive foundation for 2020 flagships. Qualcomm’s strengths lie in the fact that they’re able to deliver a complete solution with 5G connectivity – we do however hope that in the future the company will be able to offer more solid performance upgrades; the competition out there is getting tough.
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joms_us - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
Ah poorman's attempt to hide the truth. I feel sorry for those buying a phone (even replacing a desktop) because they see it flying with colors in SPEC.Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
You're just a blabbering idiot. You keep pulling things out your ass, nobody ever said A9 is faster than Ryzen or Skylake, I dare you find a quote or data that says that. The A13 was the first to *match* them.The test you quote isn't ST like the SPEC results, and it's not even a full CPU test as it has API components.
joms_us - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
Ahh the irony... Let's see who is the blabbering !d!ot here.You reminded us on who the IPC gorila is...
https://twitter.com/andreif7/status/11569659188089...
There it shows A13 and even A9 stomping the latest and greatest Ryzen and Skylake processors
But then when you compare the A13 versus the Android SoC in various apps and websites, it is the complete opposite.
I respect you because you have an excellent knowledge in what you do but it comes down to the toilet drain once your critical thinking is subpar and you are shadowed with your ego that you think yours and only yours speak the truth. I would not hesitate to hire you as my design engineer really but you have to back your claims with facts. When you state one is the fastest (especially by huge margin), it has to reflect in any test that you throw at it.
I would rest my case if you can convince Lisa or Bob that their processors are mediocre compared to Apple's latest SoC LOL.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
That tweet is about IPC of the microarchitectures, not absolute performance.You literally have absolutely not a single whim of understanding of what's going on here and keep making a complete utter fool of yourself repeating lies, all you see is a bar graph being bigger than the other and suddenly that's the your whole basis on the truth of the world.
The actual engineers and architects in the industry very well know where they lie in relation to what's Apple's doing; I don't need to convince anybody.
joms_us - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
No, you just told the whole world, that the fastest chip on the planet is the Apple SoC. A chip with great IPC will give great performance result, right? Your graph is telling us, a 1Ghz A12x core is equivalent to a 2Ghz Ryzen core which is utter BS. When AMD or Intel announce that their next processor has 20% IPC improvement, it does show in any tool/benchmark or app you throw at it not the opposite.Your tests methodology/tools are completely flawed and outdated as they don't translate to real world results. They are great though if you are comparing two similar platforms.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
> No, you just told the whole world, that the fastest chip on the planet is the Apple SoCI did not. High IPC doesn't just mean it's the fastest overall. AMD and Intel still have a slight lead in over performance.
> A chip with great IPC will give great performance result, right?
As long as the clock-rate also is high enough, yes.
> Your graph is telling us, a 1Ghz A12x core is equivalent to a 2Ghz Ryzen core
That's exactly correct. Apple current has the highest IPC microarchitecture in the industry by a large margin.
> which is utter BS.
The difference between you and me is that I actually have a plethora of data to back this up, actual instruction counter data from the performance counters, actual tests tests that show that Apple's µarch is in fact 50% wider than anything else out there.
You are doing absolutely nothing than spewing rubbish comments with absolutely zero understanding of the matter. You have absolutely nothing to back up your claims about flawed and outdated methodologies, while I have the actual companies who design these chips agreeing with the data I present.
arsjum - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Andrei,As a member of Anandtech staff, you should be better than this. This is not an XDA forum.
Come on.
LordConrad - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
Now if Samsung could just increase the anemic L2 cache. I want 1MB per A7x core and 512KB per A5x core.yankeeDDL - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
It is truly disappointing that Android HW needs to run on SoC with the performance of the iPhone 3-4 generations older.I really don't understand with all the demand there is, why nobody comes up with something at least within the range of Apple's SoC.
Wilco1 - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
You mean 2 generations behind at most on SPEC. And while interesting technically, it remains debatable how much that actually matters in actual phone use (where having fast SSD, download speeds and a lot of memory can help more). As well as having ~20% better power efficiency of course.It would be relatively easy to quadruple L2 to 1MB, L3 to 8MB and system cache to 16MB and get ~20% performance gain on SPEC. The area would be much larger and hence the cost of the SoC which would add to the cost of phones. QC's competitors would be happy to increase their market share with far cheaper SoCs which are equally fast in real-world usage.