Snapdragon 845 will deliver 300% more AI performance, 4K HDR imaging and more
The new Snapdragon 845 has a completely new architecture that sees almost all its major subsystems renewed with more performance capabilities and designed to be ever more efficient. Here's a rundown of what's new under the hood.
A new year, a new flagship
Billed as the flagship mobile processing platform of 2018, the new Snapdragon 845 will even populate a new class of always-on, always-connected laptops. For Qualcomm, that's opening the company up to a whole new ballgame. And if they do manage to increase the total available market of the notebook ecosystem, that's good news for the PC platform and for Qualcomm's financial standing too.
The Snapdragon 845 has a completely new architecture that sees almost all its major subsystems renewed with more performance capabilities and designed to be ever more efficient. There’s a fair bit that Qualcomm has touched upon and all updates are revolving around delivering great experiences across 5 key pillars – Immersion (imaging + extended reality), AI, security, connectivity and of course, performance.
These are the 5 key pillars that define the new Snapdragon 845 mobile processing platform.
And by advancing all these integral components, what can you expect in a typical day of using a Snapdragon 845 device in the future? Qualcomm has it all visualized for you:-
That might be oversimplifying things, but the video is a good representation on having your lives enriched by the next flagship processor that not only does what you need, but preempting to serve your needs just the way you want it, when you need it. That's the stuff of artificial intelligence (AI) and it's why the Snapdragon 845 is three times more capable in AI related tasks than the current flagship Snapdragon 835. There's much more to the Snapdragon 845, so let us run down on the advancements in each pillar/component of the processor and how that all adds up.
A sample of a Snapdragon 845 processing platform. The physical package is quite similar in size to the the current Snapdragon 835 ~ about 12.4 x 12.4mm in size, but its die is now fabricated on a 10nm LPP (low power profile) process technology and packs more transistors.
The refreshed building blocks of the Snapdragon 845 processing platform.
Performance expectations
In a nutshell, Qualcomm is gunning for all day battery life and beyond coupled with super-fast charging, continuous 4K HDR capture for more than 4 hours (adhering to the UltraHD Premium certification), over 3 hours of continuous VR gameplay and over two days of non-stop Ultra HD voice calls.
To achieve all this in mind, there are various areas that Qualcomm has improved the Snapdragon 845 to bring about a high level performance increase of up to 25% over its predecessor, including a 30% faster graphics engine, 2.5x speedier display throughput, 3x increase in AI related processing tasks and all of this is coupled by a 30% better power efficiency too. How did it pull this off? Let’s take a closer look at the Snapdragon 845 SoC.
The Snapdragon 845 is a 10nm SoC fabricated by Samsung’s foundry and is built on a 2nd generation 10nm LPP (low power profile) process technology, which is a step up from the first generation 10nm LPE (low power entry) process used on the Snapdragon 835. While Qualcomm isn’t keen on disclosing transistor count figures for illogical comparison ‘wars’, they did share that the package is roughly the same size as the Snapdragon 835 at about 12.4 x 12.4mm. For all the processor’s new capabilities it’s safe to assume it packs ever more transistors to make that possible.
For one, know that the new Kyro 385 CPU is now endowed with a 2MB shared L3 cache and there’s even a further 3MB of system cache that all other inter-SoC components can ride on. This cache hierarchy didn’t exist before and while Qualcomm insists it reduces power by limiting memory access bandwidth 40 to 75% and helps net overall system performance uplift (which we agree on an theoretical level), it’s interesting to note that Qualcomm also once said the additional cache was omitted because the potential benefits did not trump the extra cost in higher energy consumption and die space for the Snapdragon 820. While that was a different era, different process technology and a different set of CPU cores, it’s still an interesting observation nonetheless. Perhaps the change in cache hierarchy has to do with the increased processing demands of each processing subsystem, such as the Hexagon 685 DSP which does much of the heavy lifting for AI processing tasks. A fast nearline cache can come in handy for its machine learning tasks.
New system cache to bolster inter processing units within the Snapdragon 845 SoC and reduce the reliance of memory utilization off the SoC.
Speaking of the new CPU cores, the Kyro 385 CPU is made up of four Cortex-A75 high performance cores (clocked up to 2.8GHz) and four Cortex-A55 efficiency cores (clocked up to 1.8GHz). In terms of frequency, the high performance cores can now clock much higher than those on the Snapdragon 835 (which typically top at 2.45GHz) and the combination of the new cores and higher clock speeds nets the high performance cores up to 30% performance uplift.
One thing to note is that unlike a fully customized Kyro core, Qualcomm has chosen to use much of the stock Cortex A75 and A55 core combination from ARM. Apparently, they are quite optimized to execute non-ARM code under emulation, which Cristiano Amon (EVP and President of Qualcomm Technologies) has stressed that they’ve worked with Microsoft over two years to ensure there is no perceivable penalty issue while executing Windows 10 OS and its legacy apps. This is good news since the Snapdragon 835 and now the 845 are targeted at a new breed of always-on, always-connected notebooks running Windows 10. Of course we’ll put those claims to the test, but for now, we’ll just have to wait it out till the first of these devices hit retail from the likes of the ASUS NovaGo and HP Envy x2.
On-device AI to deliver more immersive experiences
Once a domain of cloud computing, artificial intelligence is steadily moving from the cloud to the edge devices themselves to act on real-time inputs with far lower latency and higher reliability. Plus, you can be better assured of privacy with on-device AI processing.
This steady handoff has been taking place for some while now, but it’s more pertinent than ever before for the AI to be a real game changer to bring about advanced image processing for real-time video style transfers (instead of it being a post processing option), portraiture and single camera bokeh (to reduce bill-of-material costs and make sleeker devices), Face ID (similar to iPhone X), more natural personal assistant, natural speech processing, eXtended Reality (XR, which refers to AR, VR and MR combined), new gaming experiences and advances in health and fitness monitoring. Also, according to Qualcomm:-
Snapdragon 845 improves voice-driven smart assistants with improved always-on keyword detection and ultra-low-power voice processing thanks to the performance from the Qualcomm Aqstic audio codec (WCD9341) and low-power audio subsystem, so users can interact with their devices using their voice all day.
In short, AI will help to achieve more immersive user experiences. If some of these aspects sound familiar, it’s because Huawei’s latest Kirin 970 chipset has been making waves recently with its dedicated neural processing unit that claims to assist on some of these aspects too.
Having said that, did you know that the Snapdragon 845 is the third generation of mobile AI platform? Sure enough, digging back at the Snapdragon 820 reminded us that its Hexagon 680 DSP laid the foundation of AI, machine learning and inferencing on a mobile platform. Building on that is the Hexagon 682 on the Snapdragon 835 and now a Hexagon 685 that brings with is a significant boost in AI processing speeds; Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 845 can outpace the Snapdragon 835 up to three times in processing throughput. Of course, this isn’t only due to the beefed up Hexagon 685 DSP, but also the combined uplift from the newer VPU and CPU computational engines that developers can target on the fly.
The slide provides a quick look at which computational engines are adept at processing different instruction sets.
What about the software stack, how ready is that to tackle AI? Snapdragon’s Neural Processing Engine (NPE) is a software accelerated runtime that assists in the execution of deep neural networks (DNNs) on device and it now has an updated support network:-
In addition to the existing support for Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s Caffe/Caffe2 frameworks, the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (NPE) SDK now supports Tensorflow Lite and the new Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), making it easy for developers to use their framework of choice, including Caffe2, CNTK and MxNet. Snapdragon 845 also supports Google’s Android NN API.
The NPE is also capable enough to control which computational resource to use at its disposal to complete the task at hand efficiently
Qualcomm's end-goal for AI in 2018 with the Snapdragon 845.
True Immersion – Capturing life experiences and eXtending Realities (XR)
With the updated Spectra 280 image signal processor (ISP) and the new Adreno 630 visual processing subsystem, Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 845 processing platform enables consumers to capture cinema-quality videos, blurring the lines between physical and virtual worlds.
While you were able to capture 4K resolution on smartphones for some years now, the quality and capability of your 4K captures have been steadily improving over the years. Here’s a timeline of how Snapdragon processors have progressed in in capture capabilities over the last 4 years:-
Very soon, when the first Snapdragon 845 based devices hit retail, you’ll not only be able to playback UltraHD Premium content, you will even be able to capture in UltraHD Premium standard - a first in the mobile industry, thanks to the new Spectra 280 ISP. How does this improve over standard 4K content? UltraHD Premium standard as laid down by the UHD Alliance will require 4K content to have greater color volume by capturing in greater color depth (10 bits vs. the typical 8 bits), wider color gamut (Rec.2020 color representation) and high dynamic range (HDR) for greater luminance (Rec.2020 HDR standard). To get a better idea how each aspect improves color volume, here’s an animation Qualcomm has put together:-
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Of course to truly appreciate the UltraHD Premium content you’ve captured (imagine over a billion shade of colors), you’ll need to view on an UltraHD Premium certified display. You can read more about TV options with this certification here and here.
The Spectra 280 ISP is capable of image capture at 4K @ 60fps, FHD @ ~120fps and 720p HDR10 @ 480fps (slow-mo videos). Other features that in the imaging department are Multiframe Noise Reduction at 16-megapixel/60fps, Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering, Accelerated Image Stabilization, and ImMotion computational photography and video post-processing. ImMotion videos work pretty much like a cinemagraph as you can see in this below example:-
Not only does the Spectra 280 ISP take your photography to the next level, Qualcomm claims that images captured with devices equipped with the Snapdragon 845 can reach up to 100+ rating in the popular DXOMark Mobile Image Quality Benchmark. We can’t wait to experience it first-hand. Meanwhile, the ISP has also had other architectural updates and coupled with the updated process technology, Qualcomm also claims up to 30% power reduction for video capture!
Here’s a parting slide to sum up the core improvements to the image/video capture capabilities of a Snapdragon 845 device:-
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