More details of American chip designer Qualcomm’s latest mobile System-on-Chip, the Snapdragon 835, may have been revealed in a number of leaked slides prior to the Consumer Electronics Show 2017, where Qualcomm is planning to unveil more details of the new chipset. Qualcomm originally unveiled the Snapdragon 835 back in November 2016 but did not disclose very much about the new chip, which industry experts believe will be powering 2017’s flagship smartphones from manufacturers such as Samsung, Motorola, HTC and others. The leaked information highlights the Snapdragon 835’s smaller manufacturing process, at 10nm, which means that the new champion Qualcomm chipset is smaller and uses less power than its predecessor chipsets. Other highlighted features include the underlying custom application cores being the Kryo 280 design and the chipset also benefiting from the Adreno 540 GPU. This new combination is said to bring with it 25% faster rendering with up to sixty times as many on-screen colors. The smaller size and higher performance bring with it reductions in power consumption, and Qualcomm’s slide shows the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 uses half as much energy as the Snapdragon 801, which was used in smartphones from 2014 such as the Samsung Galaxy S5, Motorola Moto X (2014) and HTC One M8.
Other features that the new Qualcomm chipset has, include a gigabit-class LTE x16 modem, embedded support for biometric security systems, a smooth zoom and very fast auto-focus feature for camera sensors, support for 10-bit, 4K, 60 fps video playback and includes support for DirectX 12, OpenGL ES and Vulkan graphics. Qualcomm have also included their Quick Charge 4 proprietary fast charging technology, which is claimed can recharge batteries some 20% faster than Quick Charge 3. According to Qualcomm, this means that just 15 minutes of time on the charger can put the battery to 50% (these statistics usually involve charging an empty or very low battery). In short, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 represents an evolution of the current flagship Snapdragon 821 chipset with improvements to many different aspects of the chip.
As for availability, the Snapdragon is expected to be released on 2017’s early flagship devices such as the next Samsung Galaxy S smartphone and the LG G6, which are rumored to be unveiled in February for a March release. With the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show being close to kick off, we probably won’t have to wait for long until Qualcomm releases far more info when it comes to the Snapdragon 835 SoC.
