Galaxy S7: Samsung said to pack Snapdragon 820 in some markets

They’re tasks that, while they could be left to the main CPU, would be power intensive to do perpetually.

Qualcomm today continued building hype for the Snapdragon 820 by boasting about the chipset’s Hexagon 680 digital signal processor (DSP).

The San Diego, Calif.-based company is describing the details of the Hexagon 680 this week at the Hot Chips engineering conference in Cupertino, Calif.

According to a recent report, Samsung are putting the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor through a number of tests to decide whether to use the processor in next years Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone.

Qualcomm has come up with a brand new signal processing chip that promises to revolutionize the field. The majority of the work that any modern Snapdragon processor must handle goes through the primary CPU cores, the GPU or the DSP. On the other hand, if the chip has actually addressed all the issues the Snapdragon 810 suffered from, we could see some variants of the Galaxy S7 powered by the chip.

Interestingly, Qualcomm opened up the DSP to programmability just four years ago, giving developers the ability to write custom code and software to take advantages of the specific performance capabilities that the DSP offers.

Qualcomm also gets more power from the Hexagon 680 in the form of Hexagon Vector eXtensions. Other than this, a modem DSP features, and a DSP, tagged as a “low-power island”, created to sensors that are always working.

Using HVX, Qualcomm’s internal data shows that its low-light video enhancement can be done with ten times less power than a quad-core Krait GPU, and three times faster to boot. This added hardware supports advanced imaging and computer vision when used with the Qualcomm Spectra camera image sensor.

Finally, Qualcomm estimates that the new DSP can cut the power required to monitor sensors by about three times compared to the previous generation Hexagon DSP. In the past year the company made a bigger push to use its own chips.

Till the Galaxy Note 4, Samsung used both Exynos and Snapdragon chipsets on its flagship devices. That is also one of the main things that Samsung is anxious about with the Snapdragon 820 as well.