Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 to offer 27% improved performance and consume 25% less power than the Snapdragon 820

As expected, Qualcomm today revealed some more details about its flagship Snapdragon 835 processor officially at CES 2017 in Las Vegas.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 sports the Qualcomm Kryo 280 CPU (quad-core), and the Adreno 540 GPU. The CPU of the device includes four “performance cores” which can run at up to 2.4GHz and it also includes four “efficiency cores” which run at 1.9GHz. All of this leads to an increase in performance by up to 27% over last year’s Snapdragon 820.

What’s even more interesting is that Qualcomm’s latest gen processor is much better than the older generation when it comes to power consumption — to be precise, the Snapdragon 835 consumes 25% less power than last year’s Snapdragon 820 which will result in an increase in the average daily usage by 2.5 hours. So the performance and power consumption improvements on the Snapdragon 835 are quite major — and as the processor is based on the 10nm FinFET technology, it’s also a bit smaller than last year’s Snapdragon 820 as shown in the picture below:

The processor also comes with Bluetooth 5, Snapdragon X16 LTE modem and QuickCharge 4.0 built-in. The updated version of QuickCharge will provide 5 hours of usage in just 5 mins of charging, according to the official press release from Qualcomm.

The Snapdragon 835 is also the first processor from Qualcomm to support Ultra HD 4K premium video playback at 60fps, and it also includes support for HDR10. The processor is also the company’s first processor to be based on the 10nm FinFET technology, which was made possible by Qualcomm’s partnership with Samsung.

Here are the full specs of the processor:

• Kryo 280 CPU with four performance cores running at up to 2.45 GHz and four efficiency cores running up to 1.9GHz
• Snapdragon X16 LTE modem with support for Category 16 LTE and Category 13 LTE upload speeds
• 2×2 11ac MU-MIMO
• 802.11ad Multi-gigabit Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 5
• Adreno 540 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 3.2, full OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan, and DX12
• Hexagon 682 DSP with HVX
• Qualcomm All-Ways Aware™ technology with support for the Google Awareness API
• dual-channel LP DDR4x memory at 1866MHz
• Qualcomm Location with support for GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, and QZSS systems
• up to 32 MP single and 16 MP dual-camera with Qualcomm Spectra 180 ISP, 2x ISP, 14-bit, hybrid autofocus (laser/contrast/structured light/dual-phase detection AF), Qualcomm® Clear Sight™, optical zoom, hardware accelerated face detection and HDR video recording
• 4K Ultra HD video capture @ 30 fps, up to 4K Ultra HD video playback @ 60 fps, support for H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC)
• Ultra HD Premium™ ready, 4K @60fps, wide color gamut support, 10-bit color depth
• Quick Charge 4
• Qualcomm Aqstic™ WCD9341 audio codec with support for audiophile grade DAC with 32-bit/384kHz
• 10nm FinFET technology

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 is also the first ARM processor capable of running full Windows 10, so all of these improvements are quite substantial for PC makers as well as smartphone makers. We will probably start seeing devices with Snapdragon 835 sometime soon this year, so it will be very fascinating to be able to experience the improvements in actual hardware.