Qualcomm gave us a preliminary view of the Snapdragon 835 back in November, but this week the chip giant has revealed all the details about its newest top tier chipset which is bound to power this year’s flagships.
The Snapdragon 835 is the first chipset from Qualcomm manufactured using the 10nm FinFET process. While it’s expected that the new chipset will bring a significant increase in computing power, one of the SoC’s biggest advantages will be conservative power consumption – which means phones using the new SoC will live significantly longer lives.
Compared to the previous-gen chipsets, the Snapdragon 835 is about 35% smaller in size and can consume 25% less power, which as we mentioned before translates in more battery life.
Speaking of battery, the Snapdragon 835 is the first to come bundled with Quick Charge 4.0. So juicing up 835 equipped phones should be 20% faster and 30% more efficient than before.
Now that we’ve shared the basic info about the Snapdragon 835, let’s see what are the main features the SoC brings to the table:
- Kyro 280 CPU with four performance cores running at 2.45GHz and four efficiency cores running at 1.9GHz
- Bluetooth 5.0 support
- Adreno 540 GPU carrying support for OpenGL ES 3.2, full OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan and DX12
- Dual-channel LP DDR4x memory at 1866MHz
- Support for up to 32MP single and 16MP dual-camera with Qualcomm Spectra IPS, 2x IPS, 14-bit, hybrid autofocus (laser/contrast/structured light/dual-phase detection AF), Qualcomm Clear Sight, optical zoom, hardware accelerated face detection, HDR video recording
- Quick Charge 4
- 4K Ultra HD video capture at 30 fps, up to 4K Ultra HD video playback at 60 fps
- Integrated Snapdragon X16 LTE model with support for Category 16 LTE download speeds up to 1GB/second and Category 13 LTE upload speeds up to 150MB/second.
- 11ad Multi-gigabit Wi-Fi allowing for up to 4.6GB/second peak speed
- Officially supports Google Daydream View VR headset
- Qualcomm Haven security platform features support for fingerprint, eye and face-based biometrics.
The Snapdragon 835 is a VR optimized chipset (it can also run mobile computing systems with full Windows 10 support) and to prove that Qualcomm revealed the first designs that will take advantage of its power and they aren’t phones. One of them is a AR/VR headset manufactured by ODG, while another is a sort of Amazon Echo alternative for kids called Mattel Aristotle.
Speaking of which, this year we expect to see the Snapdragon 835 power most flagships. We already heard rumors that the Samsung Galaxy S8, OnePlus 4 (or 5), HTC 11 and ASUS Zenfone 4 will all take advantage of the new SoC and they will certainly not be the only ones.
The new premium chip is currently undergoing mass production, so we can expect to see the first Snapdragon 835-powered devices to hit the market in the first half of 2017.
