Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996

Qualcomm Snapdragon 670

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 (SD670) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. Announced late 2018, the SD670 is the successor to the Snapdragon 660. It features 8 Kryo 360 cores (custom design, 64-Bit capable) that are divided in two clusters. A fast cluster of two cores with up to 2 GHz and a power saving efficiency cluster with up to 1.7 GHz. Both clusters can also used together.

In addition to the 8 CPU cores, the SoC integrates a mid range Adreno 616 GPU with a LPDDR4X-3733 memory controller (dual-channel 1867 MHz) and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac + MIMO, max. 867 Mbps), Bluetooth 5, and LTE (X12 LTE modem with up to 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload).

Performance

In Benchmarks the Snapdragon 670 is slightly faster than the old Snapdragon 660 and therefore a solid mid-range processor.

CPU

The Snapdragon 660 is based on a similar concept as ARM's big.LITTLE, which combines a low power CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 1.8 GHz) and a performance CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 2.2 GHz). The clock speed of each cluster can be individually adjusted (but not per core) and the lowest clock speed is 310 MHz (unverified).

Power Consumption

Thanks to the new 10 nm LPP process at Samsung, the energy efficiency has been improved noticeably compared to its 14 nm predecessors.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996 is a high-end ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. Announced in December 2015, the S820 is the successor to the Snapdragon 810 and should start shipping in the first half of 2016. In addition to 4 CPU cores (two slower clocked and two faster clocked Kryo cores), the SoC integrates an Adreno 530 GPU with a LPDDR4 memory controller  and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ad + MIMO), Bluetooth 4.1, and LTE.

CPU

The Snapdragon 820 is based on a similar concept as ARM's big.LITTLE, which combines a low power CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 1.6 GHz) and a performance CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 2.15 GHz). The clock speed of each cluster can be individually adjusted (but not per core) and the lowest clock speed is 310 MHz. The performance cluster features 1.5 MB L2 cache and the power saving one 512 KB. Both should be using the same architecture and fully support the ARMv8-ISA instruction set.

Although only four cores are used, the performance of the 820 is located in the high end of mobile CPUs for smartphones and tablets.

GPU

The Adreno 530 outperforms the previous Adreno 430 especially in high demanding benchmarks. Therefore it is well suited of modern 3D games on Android devices and should rank slightly below the Tegra X1 GPU.

Features

The Snapdragon 820 offers numerous wireless technologies such as Bluetooth 4.1, WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad (60 GHz) + MIMO as well as a dual-SIM cellular modem supporting LTE cat. 12/13 .

The SoC can encode and decode 4K videos using dedicated hardware (H.264 and H.265).

Power Consumption

Thanks to the new 14 nm process, the energy efficiency has been improved noticeably compared to its 20 nm predecessors.