Qualcomm has announced some additional details in the Snapdragon 820, specifically about their Kryo CPU. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor has been purposefully designed to power premium-tier mobile devices. Experiences like virtual reality, computer vision, and advanced imaging are helping expand smartphone capabilities, while also demanding more performance. But balancing increased performance with longer battery life has always been critical for mobile processors - and Snapdragon 820 has been designed with efficiency throughout.

The 820 is engineered with custom-built, highly optimized cores designed for heterogeneous computing—the ability to combine different functional cores of the system-on-chip (SoC), like the CPU, GPU and DSP cores. The Qualcomm says that the new SoC achieves "previously unattainable" performance and power savings, rather than using the same core for different tasks.

The CPU is still one of the most familiar cores on the modern SoC and is key in setting the speed and heartbeat for the entire processor. With the Snapdragon 820, Qualcomm Technologies is introducing Qualcomm Kryo, the company's first custom-designed 64-bit quad-core CPU, as part of a redesign of its premium-tier mobile processor.

Kryo is tightly integrated with the Adreno 530 GPU and Hexagon 680 DSP and is designed for high-performance mobile computing along with the latest in multimedia and connectivity. Kryo follows the popular custom Krait CPU, which powers the Snapdragon 800, 801, and 805 processors.

Kryo is being manufactured on the latest 14nm FinFET technology and is designed to reach speeds up to 2.2 GHz. Qualcomm says that with Kryo CPU and Snapdragon 820, you can expect up to 2 times the performance and up to 2 times the power efficiency when compared with the Snapdragon 810 processor.

Along with Snapdragon 820 and Kryo, Qualcomm is introducing Qualcomm Symphony System Manager. Because of the heterogeneous nature of Snapdragon 820, increasingly more tasks are shared among the CPU, GPU, and DSP, as well as with special purpose components such as the Qualcomm Spectra camera ISP. That means even more system performance and power savings can be achieved, when you can run the right task on the right processor, or properly combine the right processors together for the right task.

While some processors limit their system management to CPU cores, Symphony is designed to manage the entire system-on-chip in different configurations so that the most efficient and effective combination of processors and specialized cores are chosen to get the job done as quickly as possible, with the least amount of power. 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.

Kryo is the last major component to be introduced in the heterogeneous compute triad within the Snapdragon 820, in addition to the Qualcomm Adreno 530 GPU and Qualcomm Hexagon 680 DSP.