why is snapdragon 800 clocked so high vs apple soc's

[hover389]

Just curious as to why snapdragon 800 and 801 are clocked so high over 2ghz compared to any of apples soc's like a6 or a7 at 1.3ghz. Is it because the 800 is actually very inferior to the a7 that it has to basically double the clock speed? If the 800 and 801 was clocked the same as the a7 wouldnt it actually be pretty darn slow?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Because Apple's phones are pretty small, so they don't have as much room for dissipating heat or bigger batteries, so can't handle the extra power draw.

Apple doesn't have to push as many pixels, either.

 

[hover389]

Because Apple's phones are pretty small, so they don't have as much room for dissipating heat or bigger batteries, so can't handle the extra power draw.

Apple doesn't have to push as many pixels, either.

well isnt pushing pixels based on the gpu mostly? im talking is the a7 architecture at 1.3ghz that efficient that it can surpass the 800 at 2.3ghz at computing? and if so is qualcomm just taking the easy way at overclocking their soc's really high to get more power rather than having a more efficient instruction per clock rate?

 

[Pinhedd]

Just curious as to why snapdragon 800 and 801 are clocked so high over 2ghz compared to any of apples soc's like a6 or a7 at 1.3ghz. Is it because the 800 is actually very inferior to the a7 that it has to basically double the clock speed? If the 800 and 801 was clocked the same as the a7 wouldnt it actually be pretty darn slow?

Several reasons.

The Snapdragon SoCs are superior to the Apple A6 in most benchmarks. However, they also put out a LOT of heat and drain large batteries quite quickly. My Galaxy S4 has a Snapdragon 600 and it gets uncomfortably warm at times. Friends of mine who have the Nexus 5 which is equipped with a Snapdragon 800 report it getting uncomfortably warm as well. The devices also burn through their batteries quickly, so I question why the manufacturers even bothered equipping them with so much CPU power given that it's not feasible to use it all. In reality, the Snapdragons are bottlenecked by their inability to run at full throttle during most practical usage.

Architecturally the Krait architecture used in the Snapdragon SoCs, and the Swift architecture used in the A6 SoC have quite a bit in common with the ARM Cortex-A15 reference design which is also used in the Samsung Exynos SoCs. They all use the ARMv7 instruction set and fall within the ARMv7-A family.

The newer Apple A7 used in the iPhone 5S is based on a brand new 64 bit architecture that uses the ARMv8 instruction set and is a part of the ARMv8-A family. It's substantially different, so the lower clock speed does not necessarily indicate inferior performance.