A week ago, Qualcomm revealed that the Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip is already in production as the San Diego-based semiconductor manufacturer has teamed up with Samsung to use its 10-nm FinFET process for Qualcomm’s latest flagship SoC. Following that announcement, we’ve heard a wide variety of rumors related to possible commercial implementations of this mobile chip. Of course, the Snapdragon 835 is bound to power a broad range of 2017 flagships, but it’s still unclear when the first device sporting this next-generation SoC will hit the market.
Well, there might be an update on that front. Earlier today, a well-known industry analyst Kevin Wang took to Weibo to predict that the Xiaomi Mi 6 will be the first Chinese smartphone to feature the Snapdragon 835. In his post published on the popular Chinese microblogging website, Wang also stated that Qualcomm’s latest and greatest SoC will have its international debut with the Samsung Galaxy S8. Last but not least, the analyst asserted that both devices will be hitting the market in March. Of course, this is just an opinion of a single analyst, though Wang is probably right regarding the expected release window of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the Xiaomi Mi 6. In all likelihood, Samsung is debuting its next flagship during the Mobile World Congress 2017 scheduled to start on February 27th, and if the company’s previous release patterns are any indication, the Galaxy S8 will indeed be hitting the market come March. Couple that with the fact that international versions of Samsung’s flagship have a long history of using Qualcomm’s chips and it’s fair to presume that the Galaxy S8 will be sporting the Snapdragon 835, which is what Wang just did. Nonetheless, this is still just speculation, so it remains to be seen what Samsung and Xiaomi will officially announce in a few months.
Regarding the Snapdragon 835, the said SoC should be a significant upgrade on the Snapdragon 821, currently the most powerful Qualcomm-made chip. In addition to four new cores and clock speeds going up to 3 GHz, the Snapdragon 835 is also rumored to feature the Adreno 540 GPU. As for the move to the 10nm process, Samsung itself claims that this technology will allow for a 30% increase in area efficiency and 27% increase in performance. Alternatively, the new process could allow for a 40% reduction in power consumption, so all in all, Android enthusiasts have a lot to be excited about.