Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 850

Qualcomm Snapdragon 632

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 (SD632) is a mid-range octa-core SoC with eight Kryo 250 cores (Cortex-A53 based) at up to 1.8 GHz, an Adreno 506 GPU, a LPDDR3 memory controller (dual channel) and a X9 LTE (Cat 12, 300 Mbps down, 150 Mbps up) modem. Furthermore, the chip supports 802.11abgn WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0. It is manufactured in 14nm FinFet. Qualcomm states a 40% faster performance compared to the old Snapdragon 626.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 850

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Mobile Compute Platform (or SD850) is a ARM based SoC for Windows laptops. It is a higher clocked version (3 versus 2.8 GHz) of the Snapdragon 845 for smartphones and also manufactured in 10 nm LPP FinFET at TSMC. It integrates 4x Kryo 385 cores (Cortex-A75) at up to 2.95 GHz (max) for performance and 4x Kryo 385 (at 1.8 GHz?) for efficiency. Furthermore offers an X20 LTE modem (Cat. 18 1.2 Gbps downlink, Cat 13 150 Mbps uplink), ac-WiFi and a dual-channel 32-Bit 1866 MHz LPDDR4x memory controller.

The performance of the Snapdragon 850 in Windows is in theory similar to a Intel Core i5 of the Y-series (e.g. Core i5-7y54). However, this is only the case for native ARM64 compiled applications and games. 32-bit applications that are not compiled for the ARM architecture only run in an emulation and perform much worse (e.g. see Cinebench R11.5 benchmark). 64-bit Intel/AMD apps are not supported at all.

The chip is very power efficient as its produced at TSMC in the modern 10nm LPP process. Therefore, laptops using the Snapdragon 850 can be passively cooled (no fan) and should not throttle under constant load.