Snapdragon 820's Kryo CPU twice as powerful and energy-efficient as Snapdragon 810

With Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 set to be available in consumer devices from the first quarter of 2016, the vendor is teasing details on the hardware powering the SoC. We've already heard about the Adreno 530 GPU, which Qualcomm claimed was 40 percent faster than the Adreno 430 used in the Snadragon 810, and now the company is detailing its custom Kryo CPU cores.

After sticking with stock ARM Cortex cores in the Snapdragon 808 and 810, Qualcomm is back to offering a CPU core with its own architecture in the upcoming 820, the Kryo. According to the vendor, the Kryo cores — clocked at 2.2GHz — will be twice as powerful and energy efficient as the Cortex A57 and A53 cores used in this year's offering. The gains are a result of the switch from 28nm to a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process, which brings Qualcomm on par with Samsung's latest Exynos 7420 SoC.

Then you have the whole improved protection against malware to consider too. While Qualcomm hasn't detailed who will be manufacturing its chips, Samsung is the most likely candidate, given that it is able to mass-produce on the 14nm node.

Source: Qualcomm

Harish Jonnalagadda
Senior Editor - Asia

Harish Jonnalagadda is a Senior Editor overseeing Asia at Android Central. He leads the site's coverage of Chinese phone brands, contributing to reviews, features, and buying guides. He also writes about storage servers, audio products, and the semiconductor industry. Contact him on Twitter at @chunkynerd.