Benchmarking Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800

SAN FRANCISCO–Qualcomm showed off sample tablets and smartphones with its new Snapdragon 800 processor to a select group of journalists today, letting us see how it outpaces existing phones and matches Nvidia's new Tegra 4 on speed.

The Snapdragon 800 processor isn't in any retail phones yet; it'll appear in phones and tablets by the fall. Qualcomm's partner Bsquare now sells tablet and phone developers' kits to phone and application makers so they can align their hardware and software with the new chipsets, and that's what Qualcomm let us play with.

We ran a slew of benchmarks on the new kit, including all of the benchmarks we run on phones and tablets for PCMag.com reviews. The chart below shows how the Snapdragon 800 tablet, running at 2.3GHz, compared to some other popular mobile processors.

HTC's One X+ uses a 1.7-GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3. Apple's iPhone 5 uses a 1.3-GHz Apple A6. The Samsung Galaxy S 4 has a 1.9-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, the same generation but a step down from the Snapdragon 800. I also included benchmark results from an Nvidia Tegra 4 developer kit I saw at Mobile World Congress in February.

On this list, Antutu and Geekbench are synthetic system benchmarks. Geekbench measures processor and memory performance; Antutu throws in some graphics as well. GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt HD Offscreen, in the third column, is a high-resolution graphics benchmark.

I also ran Basemark OS, which toggles Bluetooth on and off and launches a few external programs, including Chrome and the phone book, to emulate some user activites. I got a 405 on Basemark OS, a good 33 percent faster than the Galaxy S 4 at 294, but the big boost was in the program launch times, which may have been slowed down by Samsung's very extensive Android skin.

Interestingly, the developer phone ran slightly slower than the developer tablet. I got the same Antutu score, but a lower score on Quadrant (another, similar benchmark) and 56 frames per second on the GLBenchmark test on the phone kit. The phone was also running warm, and Qualcomm reps said that the processor may have scaled itself back to keep things cool. That's a problem we saw previously on the LG Optimus G, the first quad-core Qualcomm phone.

Qualcomm and Nvidia seem to be keeping pace with each other here, although Nvidia will come to market with its Tegra 4 chipset first, in the Nvidia Shield gaming device at the end of this month. Qualcomm's processor, on the other hand, can encode 4K video, a trick that the Tegra 4 can't pull off. Other hallmark Snapdragon 800 features include Dolby and DTS surround sound and Fluence, built-in noise cancellation and 5.1 surround audio capture.

The 800 does all these new tricks while using slightly less power than the Snapdragon 600, according to a slide presented at the Qualcomm event.

Processor's Only Part Of The Picture
But the CPU only takes up about 15 percent of the Snapdragon chip, Qualcomm's Raj Talluri said, pointing out that modern smartphone and tablet systems-on-chip (SOCs) are complex arrangements of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, sensors and modems.

Jeff Bier, president of Berkeley Design Technology, said that "heterogenous processing" - these systems-on-a-chip full of different, specialized processors - are the only way we're going to get successively faster mobile devices without blowing away their batteries. That means we need more benchmarks and tests which measure complete experiences and applications, and not just how much math a processor core can do.

Right now, mobile devices are pretty short on experience-based benchmarks. There's nothing for Android really like PCMark or the Photoshop tests we use on laptops, which test the actual applications people use in the day to day. 

To that end, Qualcomm filled a room with "experiences" - showing off what gadgets featuring the Snapdragon 800 could do. At one station, several tablets and phones were recording and streaming 4K video. At another, a tablet showed how it could alter its screen characteristics to be more visible indoors, then outdoors. At another, a tablet showed voice recognition that was always active in the background.

What else could you use a processor this fast for? "Computer vision," for one thing - analyzing images and doing things like language translation in real time. Snapdragon 800 phones could support multiple displays, or show one 1080p image on the phone or tablet's screen and a different one on a TV. Or they could handle four high-def streams for videoconferencing.

All of these potential experiences are dependent on a lot of things before they make it to a retail U.S. phone, though: manufacturers need to weigh the cost and availability of components like screens and cameras, and of course, carriers need to make useful service plans available. (That 4K video is 800MB per minute, which would bust any data cap.) We'll see what the Snapdragon 800 brings to light this fall.