Part of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 launch event included a round table with company’s four executives and all of them, two VPs and two senior directors, strongly fended off questions over rumours about this hot topic.
Keith Kressin Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm who oversaw the SoC development and a top GPU chap Tim Leland, a Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm said his team managed to squeeze 40 percent better performance from the Adreno 530 GPU, which is definitely an impressive score. Games, Virtual reality and Unreal Engine 4 demos will be running faster than ever.
They said that the thermals were better than the company hoped for. Apparently the company learned a lot from Snapdragon 810. Since it had its own cores, Qualcomm managed to control the whole SoC design much better. The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit cores was not easy for Qualcomm but the second generation Snapdragon 820 is much fast and more power efficient, they told us.
Fudzilla saw the MDM prototype phones and tablets and they didn’t have any signs of overheating or throttling.
The SoCs has been shipped to customers and their partners work on 60 designs. Kressin was very detailed when it claim to explaining the definition of a design win. An OEM’s phone for a European bands and US regions would be counted as one design win, not two. Qualcomm was confident that most of the 60 designs will make it to the market but this is not something that company controls.
Travis Lanier a Senior Director, Product Management at Qualcomm didn’t want to get into specifics about the Kryo cores, pipelines or the clocks. However he didn’t deny that there might be more Kyro based processors coming at one point.
Peter Carson a Senior Director of Marketing at Qualcomm saw the X12 modem as a state of the art product, one which was one or more generations ahead of its competitors. While cynical journalists didn’t believe that 300 Mbit networks and carrier aggregation would happen this soon and Carson said that Telstra in Australia already launched world’s first 600 Mbps network. There is no doubt that
Qualcomm is the world leader in LTE / 4G modem technology and it seems that this will be the case for the time to come.
Qualcomm is confident that they have a strong product and that future looks good for them. It was interesting to see that that three out of four people on the table have worked for Intel, AMD or Nvidia. The IT world is really a small place.