Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 21, 2014 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- SoCs
- Snapdragon 805
CPU Performance
As always we'll start out our performance investigation with a handful of CPU bound web browser based tests. In all cases we used Chrome on the MDP/T. Remember there's only an 8% increase in peak CPU frequency here, so I wouldn't expect a huge difference vs. Snapdragon 801.
Here the MDP/T scales pretty well, showing a 6% improvement in performance over the Snapdragon 801 based Galaxy S 5. In the case of the GS5 we are looking at a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 implementation, so the improvement makes sense. Both the Cortex A15 (TF701T/Shield) and Apple's Cyclone (in the iPad Air) are higher performing designs here. Since there's no fundamental change to Krait's IPC, the only gains we see here are from the higher clock speed.
Kraken appears to be at its limit when it comes to Krait 400/450, there's effectively no additional frequency scaling beyond 2.3GHz. We're either running into an architectural limitation or limits of the software/browser combination itself.
Similarly we don't see any real progress in the Google Octane test either. Snapdragon 805's CPU cores may run at a higher peak frequency but that's definitely not the story here.
Basemark OS II
Basemark OS II gives us a look at native application performance across a variety of metrics. There are tests that hit the CPU, GPU as well as storage subsystems here. The gains here are exclusively on the graphics side, which makes sense given what we've just seen. Snapdragon 805's biggest gains will be GPU facing.
Geekbench 3.0
Although I don't typically use Geekbench, I wanted to include some numbers here to highlight that the increase in memory bandwidth for S805 over S801 doesn't really benefit the CPU cores:
| Geekbench 3.0 | |||||
| Snapdragon 801 2.3GHz (HTC M8) | Snapdragon 805 2.7GHz (MDP/T) | % Increase for S805 | |||
| Overall (Single thread) | 1001 | 1049 | 4.8% | ||
| Overall (Multi-threaded) | 2622 | 2878 | 9.7% | ||
| Integer (Single thread) | 956 | 996 | 4.2% | ||
| Integer (Multi-threaded) | 2999 | 3037 | 1.3% | ||
| FP (Single thread) | 843 | 925 | 9.7% | ||
| FP (Multi-threaded) | 2636 | 3155 | 19.7% | ||
| Memory (Single thread) | 1411 | 1406 | 0% | ||
| Memory (Multi-threaded) | 1841 | 1949 | 6% | ||
I wouldn't read too much into the multithreaded FP results, I suspect we're mostly seeing differences in thermal dissipation of the two test units. A closer look at the memory bandwidth numbers confirms that while the 805 has more memory bandwidth, most of it is reserved for GPU use:
| Geekbench 3.0 - Memory Bandwidth | |||||
| Snapdragon 801 2.3GHz (HTC M8) | Snapdragon 805 2.7GHz (MDP/T) | % Increase for S805 | |||
| Stream Copy (Single thread) | 7.89 GB/s | 8.04 GB/s | 1.9% | ||
| Stream Copy (Multi-threaded) | 9.53 GB/s | 10.1 GB/s | 5.9% | ||
| Stream Scale (Single thread) | 5.36 GB/s | 5.06 GB/s | - | ||
| Stream Scale (Multi-threaded) | 7.31 GB/s | 7.63 GB/s | 4.3% | ||
| Stream Add (Single thread) | 5.27 GB/s | 5.2 GB/s | - | ||
| Stream Add (Multi-threaded) | 6.84 GB/s | 7.51 GB/s | 9.8% | ||
| Stream Triad (Single thread) | 5.64 GB/s | 5.85 GB/s | 3.7% | ||
| Stream Triad (Multi-threaded) | 7.65 GB/s | 7.89 GB/s | 3.1% | ||
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Arbie - Friday, May 23, 2014 - link
Yes, but can it run Crysis?Krysto - Sunday, May 25, 2014 - link
No. But Tegra K1 probably can, not just because it's twice as fast, but because it has a much more PC-parity API than Adreno 420.errorr - Friday, May 23, 2014 - link
I wonder what the heuristics are like for switching graphics from TLDR to direct rendering are and whether they are tweaked depending on tablet or phone usage.Abandoning TLDR to use that giant amount of bandwidth is going to use oodles of power. This is why I doubt you will see NV Kepler on a phone and restrict it to tablets.
fteoath64 - Saturday, May 24, 2014 - link
True. Remember NV do have Maxwell shipping on desktop form so its mobile variant is probably in testing/optimization phase right now with possibly reserving it for near future opposition.Krysto - Sunday, May 25, 2014 - link
Denver + Maxwell at FinFET 16nm, now THAT'S a beauty to behold. Hopefully Nvidia doesn't have anymore delays, though.Krysto - Sunday, May 25, 2014 - link
No VP9 decoding? And when is Qualcomm going to open source its baseband firmware? Otherwise we can just assume it's backdoored these days, therefore making the whole phone vulnerable to attacks and espionage.Keermalec - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
OK so your excuse, Anand, for not including Tegra K1 or Exynos 5433 in your benchmarks was that you didn't have them available on May 21. Now you do as K1 and Exynos 5433 are shipping while Snapdragon 805 still is not.So can you correct this article to show 805's performance vs the real competition? Pitting it against last year's Tegra 4 and Exynos 5 Octa is just wrong.
HibikiTaisuna - Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - link
Wow, didn't expect that my Tegra K1 is so much better than these SoCs. 50% more graphics performance and even 10% to 20% more CPU Performance (the week part of the Tegra K1).Edwardnew - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
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