Hardware Overview: Come across the Snapdragon 810

The primary new piece of hardware we're seeing in the One M9 is Qualcomm'southward Snapdragon 810 SoC, which is currently their highest-terminate chip on the market. At that place were a few mumblings before the launch of the Samsung Milky way S6 that suggested the Snapdragon 810 is a hot SoC, causing thermal issues for Samsung'south latest design, although it hasn't seemed to phase HTC with its metallic-bodied flagship.

The Snapdragon 810 is the starting time high-stop SoC from Qualcomm in several years to use ARM designed CPU cores, rather than custom in-firm cores from their Krait line. This is because Qualcomm was keen to get in on the 64-bit action, and although they hold an ARMv8 license that allows them to produce custom 64-chip ARM cores, their designs weren't quite ready for release in time for the Snapdragon 810 moving to a sampling phase.

Equally such, the Snapdragon 810 features a CPU blueprint like to other high-end ARMv8 SoCs: iv+4 large.LITTLE, featuring four ARM Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 1.96 GHz, and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.56 GHz. Thanks to Global Job Scheduling, the Snapdragon 810 can act as a truthful 8-core processor, with a CCI-400 interconnect providing cache coherency betwixt the 2 clusters of cores.

If you're not familiar with ARM big.LITTLE designs, the smaller cores (in this case the A53s) are included for low-power, high-efficiency tasks. When more power is required for high-performance tasks, the second cluster of cores (the A57s) will either be exclusively used, or used in tandem with the A53s, depending on how multi-threaded the task is. While the A57s are faster than the A53s clock for clock – and in the case of the Snapdragon 810, clocked higher besides – they employ significantly more energy, making them less suitable for low-performance tasks.

This is a completely different design to what Qualcomm has used in the by. In the Snapdragon 805, the previous-gen flagship, Qualcomm opted for a straight quad-core CPU cluster from their in-business firm ARMv7 Krait 450 line, clocked at 2.65 GHz. Although the clock speeds across the cores in the Snapdragon 810 are lower, the performance overall should exist higher thank you to greater performance per clock in the latest ARMv8 designs, and the inclusion of more cores.

We can look to see Qualcomm'due south in-house ARMv8 pattern, Kyro, in the upcoming Snapdragon 820.

The GPU in the Snapdragon 810 is the usual custom Adreno pattern from Qualcomm, this fourth dimension the Adreno 430. As usual, Qualcomm hasn't released many details on the Adreno 430, although they claim a functioning improvement of 30% over the Adreno 420 in shader-heavy workloads. Clock speeds should be the aforementioned as the previous GPU, at 600 MHz.

Qualcomm has likewise upgraded the DSP to a Hexagon V56 at 800 MHz, which is used for depression ability tasks such equally sensor direction and audio decoding. The Snapdragon 810 comes with 4K HEVC/H.265 encoding and decoding support for the first fourth dimension, as well as an upgraded dual ISP setup supporting 1.2 GP/due south of bandwidth.

Retentiveness back up is listed as dual-channel 32-flake LPDDR4-1600, providing 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth. Although this is the same bandwidth memory as the Snapdragon 805, the move to LPDDR4 brings a 20% reduction in power. The One M9 comes with 3 GB of RAM to become with 32 GB of internal storage, of which around 21 GB is usable out of the box. There's likewise microSDHC card support in instance yous experience 32 GB of storage is a little tight on a modern flagship.

The Snapdragon 810 supports LTE Category 9 with Carrier Aggregation, which is overkill for today's mobile networks, only does support up to 450 Mbps downstream and l Mbps up. There's as well the usual array of other connectivity features, including dual-band (two.four and five.0 GHz) Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/thou/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.ane, and A-GPS+GLONASS. The Snapdragon 810 can support Wi-Fi 802.11ad, though it's not enabled in the One M9 every bit it requires actress fries; however the M9 does come with NFC and infrared.

As for LTE support, there is one variant of the One M9 (that I know of), which supports FDD bands 1, three, v, vii, 8, twenty and 28, equally well equally TDD bands 38, twoscore and 41. Combined with HSPA+ support on the 850, 900, 1900 and 2100 MHz, this variant supports most networks across Europe, Africa and Asia Pacific, with express support for the Americas. I suspect a 2d variant will be produced to cover this region.