Gadgetory

hello my name's Gary Sims from and or authority now the details of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 have recently been released and we can see that the nude Snapdragon will be using a semi custom arm core called the cryo 280 now it's built using a new license agreement with arm who built on cortex technology so what is built on cortex technology why our qualcomm using it and what does it mean for arm well let me explain okay first just a quick refresher up internal arm of had two types of major license one is the cortex license which allows a company like Qualcomm or Samsung or mediatek to take arms IPD little property that means a CPU core and use it unchanged unmodified as is in a product so they might take the cortex a 72 core and put it inside of a CPU now they also had a thing called the architectural license which allows a company like a cork on Samsung and Apple to design arm compatible calls using their own engineers a complete cleanroom design that has no reference to existing cortex designs from arm now Qualcomm has an architectural license and they used it in the Snapdragon 820 and the a21 over the Snapdragon 835 it's taken a different route and that's to use a new license agreement from arm called built on cortex technology and what that basically allow someone like Qualcomm to do is to take an arm core maybe the Kois a 73 and then modify it slightly change it tweak it to their own particular needs and then brand it under their own branding this case the cryo branding but just recognize long the way that's built on cortex ARM Cortex technology now what is this kind of tweaking that they can do well a CPU is obviously a very complicated piece over and there are lots of things going on on the inside there are lots of bits that make up the CPOE including things like a branch predictor for out of order instruction execution is a thing called an instruction window and we take the instruction window as an example that basically means how many instructions ahead the CPU can look to find another instruction that it can execute in parallel with which is OK which only affect other instructions that are going on and the bigger that instruction window the more further ahead you can look to find instructions to execute in parallel but obviously the bigger that window the more resources the CPU needs in terms of internal buffering in terms of copies of the register banks in terms of just remembering the state of everything that's going on it needs more and more mean more silicon and silicon is costly and it also means more power and it also means that actually the frequency targets might not be met because it's difficult to juggle all that stuff going on and still hammer on at 22.5 2.8 gigahertz so basically when arm design a CPU they they make a decision about the frequency about the silicon size about the things that the instruction windows the branch predictors a whole bunch of other things and say this is our target this is what we're going to make and this is what we're going to do now then someone like Qualcomm Cumberland says that's brilliant we like that but we want to tweak it so that maybe the instruction window is bigger maybe there's some things we can do is a branch particularly some things we can do with other parts of internals but don't break the design they don't change the design but they just change it in a subtle way tweaking kind of adding on bits because they might say well actually we prepared to pay for more silicon we've repaired to spend the time to get that frequency target just right even though we've made it a more complicated CPU so the way it works is that Qualcomm will take a core design from our minute it to engineers will then tweak it in partnership with arm to produce the CPU that they want and then they can brand it under their own branding so up until now when a chip maker took a core from arm it had three ways in which you kind of integrate that core one is of course it could choose how many cores it wanted to use and in what combination so maybe they wanted a quad core or a hexa core an opportunity they wanted to combine it with some big calls and some little cores and they had that choice to make although Tiffany's and Qualcomm have chips just like that in their 400 series in their 600 series they've taken arms IP and they've built six core chips and quad core chips and they've built them however they wanted to the second thing of course the chip maker can choose is the physical layout they can choose to have it on 28 nanometers or 10 nanometers or 16 nanometers and that has repercussions in terms of development course in terms of manufacturing course in terms of die size and the third thing they could do up until now is they can mix and match which components they added a twin so if there were an all arm shop maybe like mediatek then they could take the GPU from arm them are marley they could take the interconnect bits of silicon they can take the display driver they could take the video chip and they can combine them all together but in Qualcomm's case they combined it with their own GPU for example so and their own modems and their own DSP so we know that Cole Cobb are already mix and matching so that's three different things so they could choose how many cores they could choose the physical attributes of it and they could choose what they combined it with now there's a fourth dimension our fourth axes we've built on quality technology which means they can take the CPU core and they can also tweak that they can change it they can fiddle with some of the parameters to get a different performance characteristics according to the needs of that particular OAM and the great thing is that those tweaks those changes remain only for that company they don't get them passed on to Samsung or to mediatek they just belong to Qualcomm and it's its own special variant of that call they took from arm as what we're seeing with the Snapdragon 835 is you've got Qualcomm's own technology like it's a GPU DSPs and it's image processors and then they've taken a CPU core from arm and they've modified it to be their own special custom variation of that core which will only be inside of the Snapdragon chips now that is then called the cryo 280 and my thinking is its cryo - second generation cryo and it's got eight core so it's acro 280 and maybe we'll see a cryo - dear crow 240 and maybe next year we might see the cryo 340 or the cryo 380 this is just speculation on my path but that seems to be where the naming is coming from so the reason quorum of doing this cause it's because it's cheaper for them armed all the heavy lifting they get a CPU design up and running and then Qualcomm the engineers take that off them and then they can modify it to bring it up to their particular set of specifications and it also means it's quicker because I'm already developing chips they've just announced the a 73 that's probably what this one is based on and they're sure they've got other chips in the pipeline they're working on now and they don't need to call currently to have engineers doing that am i doing that phone and they can use their engineers to concentrate on the DSPs and the ISPs and the interconnects and the GPU and tweaking the CPU core and then combining it all together to be the system on a chip that is the Snapdragon 835 so the result should be a higher performance and highly efficient system on a chip because you've got core columns GPU technology which is excellent you've got their other stuff like their DSPs and their image processors and then you've got this custom version of a cortex core and then that should really be a great chip for 2017 and I'm really looking forward to seeing it in some devices and seeing what this chip can do well my name is Gary sim from Andrea Ora tea I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up I'd also like to give a big shout out to Robert Triggs my colleague here and your authority he wrote a great article about this subject which you can find over at the Android throat accom website please don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel download our app because that will give you access to all of our news and features directly on your mobile phone and last but not least don't forget to go always to andragogy calm because we are your source for all things Android Oh