Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 780G 5G

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.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 780G 5G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 780G 5G (SM7350-AB Mobile Platform) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. It integrates eight cores (octa-core) divided into three clusters. A fast prime core for single thread performance based on the ARM Cortex-A78 architecture with up to 2.4 GHz. Three additional A78 based performance cores with up to 2.2 GHz and a power efficiency cluster with four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.9 GHz. Depending on the workload only single clusters or all cores can run at different clock speeds.

Thanks to the new Cortex-A78 cores, the CPU performance increases by up to 40% compared to the old Snapdragon 768G according to Qualcomm. In our benchmarks, the 780G is able to reach the performance of the old high end chip Kirin 990. The multi-thread performance is similar to the old Snapdragon 865+ in the Galaxy Z Fold2, but using a single core, the 780G is trailing behind.

The integrated X53 5G modem supports up to 3.3 Gbps with sub 6Ghz. The FastConnect 6900 Wi-Fi modem supports the current Wi-Fi 6e standard with 6GHz.

The integrated Qualcomm Adreno 642 offers a 50% higher performance compared to the old Adreno 620 in the predecessor. This is partly thanks to the fast memory controller with LPDDR4X-4200 support.

The integrated 6th gen AI engine called Hexagon 770 offers a 2x improvement and up to 12 TOPS of performance. The Spectra 570 ISP (image signal processor) supports up to three cameras. The satellite system supports all major standards like Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS and GPS.

The G specifies an optimized SoC for gaming and e.g. Qualcomm offers updates for the graphics driver.

The Snapdragon 780G is manufactured in the modern 5 nm process at Samsung (5LPE with EUV).