Hexagon 680 DSP will help take a load off of the main CPU of the Snapdragon 820 chipset

On Monday, Qualcomm spoke at the Hot Chips conference about a major component of the upcoming Snapdragon 820 chipset. The Hexagon 680 Digital Signal Processor will be part of the new top-shelf SoC, taking some of the heavy load off of the main processor, allowing it to use less power and save battery life.

There are three parts to the Hexagon 680. One part helps the chip process audio, voice, images, and video. It helps brighten dark areas of photographs and videos by using algorithms. It also reduces battery consumption during image and video processing. The DSP will help improve the performance of both virtual reality and augmented reality apps.

The second part of the DSP helps provide energy to low-power using sensors, and powers always-on features like voice recognition. Not only does this help extend the battery life of a Snapdragon 820 powered device, it also takes work away from the main CPU. The third and last part of this DSP is a modem which handles multimode, carrier aggregation and global LTE connectivity.

The Snapdragon 820 is expected to start showing up in new handsets during the first quarter of 2016. The first phone expected to be powered by it is the Xiaomi Mi 5. Coming off the overheating experience with the Snapdragon 810 SoC, all eyes will be on the Snapdragon 820 chip to see if it has any heating issues.


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source: GizmoChina