Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 Specifications Lay Out Performance, Power & Graphics Boost
Qualcomm’s been seeing mixed fortunes when it comes to processors
lately. The US chip giant faced its lowest point in recent history with
the Snapdragon 810. The processor, which came with big promises, ended
up overheating on almost every device that it featured on. We saw a
quick response in the form of the Snapdragon 820 this year. The
processor featured a tighter integration of the CPU, GPU and the DSP,
coupled with Qualcomm’s custom Kryo cores, based on ARM’s designs.
Still, this didn’t provide the level of performance users and industry
watchers had come to expect from the company. True to form, Qualcomm was
quick to launch the Snapdragon 821 last month. The processor, which is
yet to feature on a device improves things by quite a bit on its
predecessor.
The Snapdragon 821 Will Support More Features, Offer Improved Performance & Power Consumption
The launch of the Snapdragon 821 in August surprised quite a bit of
folks. After all, a mid year flagship processor launch from Qualcomm is
quite rare. This led towards speculation that Samsung would equip the
Galaxy Note with the Snapdragon 821. But, perhaps wanting to keep things
even with the Exynos 8890, the Note 7 came and went without it. Now,
it’s HTC Sailfish and Marlin that are expected to come with the
processor. Just in time, Qualcomm itself has released some more
performance details for the Snapdragon 821.
The company claims to have improved performance in three areas for the
Snapdragon 821. The first of these is user experience. The Snapdragon
821, according to Qualcomm, will offer faster boot and app load times,
coupled with smoother user experience. On the performance side, we’re
now hearing about more upgrades in addition to the 10% expected
performance boost for the 821’s Kryo cores. The Adreno 530 on the
Snapdragon 821 will also offer 5% speed boosts over the Snapdragon 820
and the processor as a whole will offer increased power efficiency as
well.
