Image: Qualcomm
Pick up any Android smartphone in the market today and chances are high that it’ll be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. Yesterday, the company revealed performance benchmarks for its latest and greatest SoC, the Snapdragon 835.
Some smartphone makers have taken to designing their own chips, Notably Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi, but Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon processors have always set the tone in the market. The 800-series Snapdragon chips are the cream of the crop.
An SoC (System-on-Chip) is an all-in-one chip that houses all the electronics your phone needs to function. This includes the modems for wireless connectivity, the processor for logical calculations, the storage unit, RAM, image-processing unit and so on.
Qualcomm, like other chipmakers, usually license processor core designs from ARM, a chip designer, and then integrates it into the SoC. Qualcomm’s expertise lies in designing a cohesive SoC, and they’re very good at it.
The Snapdragon 835 is the latest iteration of the SoC and as with the Snapdragon 820 before it, is expected to make its presence felt in every flagship device in the market this year.
Production issues have limited the availability of the new chip and Samsung, which is making the chips for Qualcomm, is also hogging the first production run for its own phones. Because of this, we haven’t yet seen any new smartphone with an SD 835 SoC, and don’t expect to see one until the Galaxy S8 arrives later this month.
Qualcomm unveiled the technical specifications of the new chip and some performance benchmarks to AnandTech at the company’s San Diego headquarters.
First, here’s how it stacks up against the Snapdragon 820:
| SoC | Snapdragon 835 | Snapdragon 820 |
| CPU | 4xKryo 280 at 2.45GHz, 4xKryo 280 at 1.9GHz | 2x Kryo at 2.15GHz, 2x Kryo at 1.59GHz |
| GPU | Adreno 540 at 710MHz | Adreno 530 at 624MHz |
| RAM | LPDDR4x at 1866MHz | LPDDR4x at 1866MHz |
| Camera support | 1x 32MP or 2x 16MP | 1x 25MP or 2x 13MP |
| Modem | Snapdragon X16 LTE | Snapdragon X12 LTE |
| Mfc. Process | 10nm LPE | 14nm LPP |
As you can see, Qualcomm has now moved to an 8-core chip and a 10nm process. The clock speeds of the CPU and GPU are also faster, which should directly translate to improved performance. The new Snapdragon X16 modem now means that the platform supports download speeds up to 1000Mbps, not that any ISP actually offers those speeds.
The Kryo 280 CPU cores are not a direct upgrade to the 820’s Kryo cores however. Qualcomm designed the first Kryo cores in-house, and they were very good, offering a major performance bump over the ARM-designed Cortex cores that Qualcomm used in the Snapdragon 808 and 810.
The Kryo 280, however, is again an ARM-designed Cortex core, but with some modifications. As part of a new licensing regime, chip makers can now ask ARM to make some modifications to ARM’s Cortex cores. The rights to these modifications are owned by ARM, but will not be available to any other manufacturer. It’s not clear why Qualcomm choose to go this route rather than build their own cores, as they did previously.
Anandtech speculates that Qualcomm is using modified ARM Cortex A73 cores. The new Adreno 540 GPU is a Qualcomm design however.
So how does it fare? Anandtech ran a number of standardised benchmarks to determine the performance of the platform. It must be noted that the tests were conducted on Qualcomm-designed reference devices rather than commercially available device. These results may not indicate real world performance in phones like the Galaxy S8, especially as device manufacturers tend to introduce their own refinements to the design.
Image: Qualcomm
CPU-only tests reveal that the SD835 performs around 10-22 percent better than the SD820 and that it beats competitors by a slim margin. This is in integer tests, which is more relevant for web browsing and other day-to-day activities performed on your smartphone.
The platform does appear to falter in floating point operation tests, where it’s around 23 percent slower than SD821. This may not affect real world performance much.
Overall the SoC is better than most current SoCs on the market and even beats the iPhone 7 in some tests. The iPhone 7 still finds a way to sneak ahead in some tests though, particularly in JavaScript performance.
GPU tests are where the new chipset really shines. The Adreno 540 is already clocked around 14 percent higher than on its predecessor. Overall, performance appears to be over 25 percent better than before, concludes Anandtech. It also handily beats the iPhone 7 in these tests.
All things considered, it seems that the Snapdragon 835 is indeed faster than the generation it replaces. However, its performance is apparently very comparable to Huawei Mate 9’s Kirin 960 SoC.
Power consumption could not be tested.
Publish date: March 23, 2017 2:01 pm| Modified date: March 23, 2017 2:01 pm
