Qualcomm opted to skip the traditional naming with the Snapdragon 835, and there’s a good reason why. Qualcomm told a group of journalists back in November, when they announced the name of the new chipset that they decided to go with “835” over “830” because they did an internal survey among their employees and found that people would be more inclined to buy a device with a Snapdragon 835 inside instead of a Snapdragon 830. It makes sense, since the Snapdragon 835 sounds like a newer processor over the Snapdragon 830. But that was their thinking behind the naming here. They also wanted to keep everyone on their feet, because many leaks were referring to the processor as the Snapdragon 830 (after all, we went from Snapdragon 800, to 810, to 820, so it made sense).
The Snapdragon 835 is the company’s newest flagship SoC. It is in mass production right now and is already available to many of their partners. Currently, there are no announcements about which devices will be sporting the new processor, but many of the flagships to come out this year will like be running on the newest chip out of Qualcomm. The company says to expect Snapdragon 835-powered devices in the first half of the year. Which means we should see plenty of new devices with this chipset at Mobile World Congress at the end of February.
There’s more than just sheer power with the Snapdragon 835 here, we’re looking at an octa-core processor again, after Qualcomm opted to drop the octa-core architecture after the Snapdragon 810 proved to be too hot to handle and went back to a quad-core setup in the Snapdragon 820. There are four performance cores here and then four efficiency cores that work together to give the user a powerful device, but also a device that is great on battery life. The Snapdragon 835 also brings along Quick Charge 4.0, which as expected, is faster than Quick Charge 3.0. It’ll charge your smartphone faster than ever before, and Qualcomm says that they have done plenty of testing with this one, so that it won’t make your smartphone burst into flames (just a reminder, Quick Charge 3.0 was not the culprit behind the Galaxy Note 7 issues, and we know that because the Galaxy Note 7 didn’t support Quick Charge 3.0).