The highly anticipated 2020 “New Year’s flagship”-Xiaomi Mi 10 series will officially be launched on February 13. As the SoC of Xiaomi Mi 10 series, the Snapdragon 865 can almost be said to be the strongest flagship of the Android camp this 2020.
Parameter Comparison
First of all, let’s look at the differences between the Snapdragon 865 and Snapdragon 855 in their respective core parameters. As we all know, for the mobile phone SoC, there are “three major component” related to superior performance, namely CPU, GPU and memory support. The Snapdragon 865 has significantly improved in these aspects.
In addition to the CPU and GPU upgrades, the Snapdragon 865 is also the first SoC to support LPDDR5 (also compatible with LPDDR4x), and Xiaomi Mi 10 is also equipped with LPDDR5 as their standard configuration. The process technology of the Snapdragon 865 is also more advanced than that of the Snapdragon 855. Although both are 7nm, the Snapdragon 865 has been upgraded to the new 7nm (N7P).
CPU: New A77 architecture, 25% performance improvement
From the perspective of the CPU, although the frequency of the super-large core, large core and small core is not different from the previous Snapdragon 855, but the super core and large core of the Snapdragon 865 are deeply customized based on Cortex-A77. This is also the most powerful CPU core of the Android camp today, and it is also the latest product of ARM. Compared with the Snapdragon 855 and Cortex-A76 used in mainstream mid-to-high-end products on the market, it is much stronger in single-core performance. In addition, the Snapdragon 865 also has twice the shared L3 cache of the Snapdragon 855.
We look at the official data from ARM. Under the same process and the same frequency, Cortex-A77 has a 20% performance improvement over Cortex-A76. The Snapdragon 865 is exactly the same frequency as the Snapdragon 855. In addition to the advantages of the process, it can be seen that the absolute performance of the Snapdragon 865’s super core and large core will be improved by more than 20% compared to the Snapdragon 855. The increase is quite commendable.
Why is the A77-based Kryo 585 CPU so much improved? The improvement of A77 compared to A76 in micro-architecture is comprehensive, including:
1. the first ARM CPU with multiple branch instruction execution units, the branch instruction execution unit is twice that of A76;
2. the branch prediction bandwidth is doubled;
3. Branch buffer increased by 33%;
4. Instruction distribution bandwidth increased by 50%;
5. Out-of-order execution window increased by 25%;
6. The fourth ALU was added.
To put it simply, suppose A77 is a courier company:The increase in branch target buffer and branch prediction bandwidth is like an increase in warehouse area. Increase the warehouse area to store more packages;
The order distribution bandwidth, the out-of-order execution window is like an automatic sorting robot in the warehouse. The more automatic sorting robots, the faster the parcel processing speed can be assigned to a specific express brother.
The branch instruction execution unit and ALU are our express brothers. The more courier brothers, the faster the courier will reach us.
Through these low-level enhancements, Kryo 585 is inherently faster and more efficient than the A76, which is a major innovation in the evolution of mobile processors in recent years.
Only discussing theoretical performance, everyone may not have a too deep concept of the CPU performance of Xiaomi 10, and look directly at the performance score of the CPU. Geekbench 5 is the latest version of Geekbench. Compared to Geekbench 4.X, it has more pressure, and is more objective in terms of evaluation criteria. Whether it is single-core or multi-core performance, there is no doubt that it leads the Android camp. Compared with the previous generation of Snapdragon 855/855 +, it has a significant improvement. Compared to the same-frequency Snapdragon 855, there is a single core improvement of about 25% and a multi-core improvement of 29%.
GPU: Still the strongest graphics processor
With the rapid development of mobile games, large-scale games with high picture quality and high frame numbers place higher requirements on the overall performance of mobile phones, especially graphics processing performance. Qualcomm’s flagship SoC has always been the industry leader in this regard, and the Snapdragon 865 used by Xiaomi 10 goes one step further and uses the Adreno 650 graphics processor.
Although there is almost no increase in frequency (Adreno 650 frequency is 587MHz), the increase in graphics performance from Adreno 640 to Adreno 650 is still considerable. Qualcomm officially claims that it has 25% graphics performance improvement and 35% energy efficiency improvement. This also provides a solid foundation for the gaming performance of the Xiaomi 10 series.
The improvement of GPU performance is mainly because Adreno 650 is equipped with 1.5 times rendering pipeline (50% increase in rendering pipeline), and 1.5 times pixel processing unit (50% increase in pixel unit). Adreno 650 GPU also adds an additional 8bit fixed-point arithmetic acceleration unit, Equipped with Adreno NNDirect computing library (including OpenCL ML, Vulkan ML libraries), providing powerful computing power for AI acceleration.
The Adreno 650 adds 10-bit HDR game support, and has already supported related special effects on the Jedi Survival International Edition. It has also added Game Color Plus visual enhancements to improve game quality without modifying the game code. It can be seen that in addition to performance improvements, Adreno 650 has made great progress in picture quality and peripheral support.
After we upgrade to a later version of Android, we often see updates to the GPU driver version, and some GPUs even bring new performance improvements after getting a new driver. However, due to differences in development progress by different manufacturers, some models may not have the latest GPU driver upgrades at the first time, and users may be envious of some of the first models to get the new version. In order to solve this problem, Qualcomm and Google exclusively cooperated to develop an online driver update function for the Adreno 650. Users can manually upgrade the latest version of the Adreno GPU driver directly in the software market. Xiaomi 10 of course also supports this function.
Similarly, we also used some objective running scenes to test the performance of Adreno650. In GFXBench’s off-screen test, although the frequency is “only” 587MHz, the GPU performance of the Snapdragon 865 is still significantly higher than that of the Snapdragon 855+ with a frequency of 675MHz. This shows that the Adreno 650 has the same frequency performance Improve, compared to competing products, the graphics performance of the Snapdragon 865 also has absolute advantages.
In the more stressful GFXBench 5.0 test scenario, the situation is similar to the previous old scenarios. The Snapdragon 865 can also dominate the Android camp.
Taking Photos: 4 times the number of pixels processed per unit
Nowadays, the camera performance of mobile phones is getting stronger and stronger, and high-pixel, multi-camera, and multi-focus cameras have become the development direction, which puts new requirements on the ISP performance of mobile phones. Snapdragon 865’s new Spectra 480, which can process 2 billion pixels per second, supports 4K HDR video shooting of 64MP photos at the same time. The powerful ISP allows the mobile phone to still have fast imaging speed in 108Mp mode, HDR and night scene mode, which is crucial for the mobile phone’s camera experience.
The Spectra 480 processes 4 pixels simultaneously in one clock cycle, while the average ISP can only process one pixel. The new ISP has a dedicated noise reduction module with motion compensation. The Snapdragon 865’s mobile phone reduces power consumption by 16%, improves texture by 18%, and can process 40% more pixels. In addition, the Snapdragon 865 also supports the HEIF format, which can save more image information, which is more efficient than traditional formats, and even supports saving depth of field information.
AI performance: doubled performance, 15TOPS computing power
As our phones become more and more “smart”, powerful AI performance is also an indispensable feature of a flagship phone, relying on Qualcomm’s latest heterogeneous computing engine (fifth-generation AI Engine), Xiaomi Mi 10 Snapdragon 865 The AI performance is more than twice that of the Snapdragon 855. Stronger AI performance can allow Xiaomi Mi 10 to have a better experience in various scenarios such as video blurring, image recognition, automatic scene optimization for photography, and speech recognition. It also provides sufficient for future applications that incorporate more AI computing.
In order to make better use of the performance of Snapdragon 865, Xiaomi Mi 10 also launched Micron and Samsung’s LPDDR5 memory chips. Xiaomi Mi 10 is equipped with LPDDR5 as standard, and it starts with 8G capacity. The frequency is increased to 2750MHz, the bandwidth is 29% stronger than the previous LPDDR4x 2133MHz, and the bandwidth has reached 44GB / s. At the same time, the power consumption of the entire machine in the game scene can be reduced by about 20%.
5G network is one of the hottest topics in the mobile phone industry today. With the further improvement of LAN broadband and more and more access devices, the upgrade of Wi-Fi technology is also a top priority. The emergence of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) has solved the user ’s problem of broadband and multi-device connection. It has a higher bandwidth than the common 802.11ac on mobile phones (The theoretical peak of Snapdragon 865 is 1774Mbps, which is common. Mobile phones are 833Mbps), and can better meet the needs of multi-device connection. Xiaomi Mi 10 also supports Wi-Fi 6 technology, thanks to the Fast Connect 6800 subsystem of the Snapdragon 865. It is also a system that integrates Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.1 and aptX Bluetooth codec.
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