Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 820 with custom quad-core Kyro CPU

Qualcomm has announced its next generation flagship chipset named Snapdragon 820, which will also mark the return of Qualcomm's in-house custom processor cores. Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 will house the quad-core Kyro CPU (which is the successor of Krait) and will be addressed at the premium segment of the market.The 64-bit Kyro CPU will be based on Samsung's 14nm FinFET process and will be able to reach clock speeds of up to 2.2GHz. Qualcomm claims that this will give the Snapdragon 820 will give a 2x increase in performance and up to 2x increased in power efficiency as compared to the Snapdragon 810 chipset. This will be paired with an Adreno 530 GPU and a Hexagon 680 DSP.Qualcomm says that the Kyro CPU has been designed keeping in mind heterogeneous computing. This basically lets you combine different functional cores of the chipset such as the CPU, GPU and digital signal processing cores to get better performance and ensure power savings as well. Each individual cores on the Snapdragon 820 have been custom designed to work together and effectively.Qualcomm is also announcing the Symphony System Manager which is meant to deal with heterogeneous computing in an efficient manner. It achieves this by allocating the right tasks to the right processors or allocating the right combination of processors for a particular task. Qualcomm says, "For example, when a user is taking a picture, Symphony responds to the system demand making sure that the right components are powered up running at the needed frequency and only as long as needed. These components include CPU, Spectra ISP, Snapdragon Display Engine, GPU, GPS, and memory system."