Qualcomm: Snapdragon 835-soc is 35 percent smaller than 820

Qualcomm released more details about the Snapdragon 835 during CES, the soc that will come in the high-end smartphones of 2017. The soc is smaller and more economical than its predecessor, the Snapdragon 820.

The size reduction of 35 percent is due to the switch from a 14nm production process to Samsung’s 10nm production. The soc contains three billion transistors. According to Qualcomm, the reduction gives manufacturers room to build in larger batteries, for example. The Snapdragon 835 would consume 25 percent less than the 820, which means longer battery times are on the horizon.

The efficiency improvement would also be due to the Symphony System Manager. This technique distributes the workload between the Qualcomm Kryo 280 CPU, Qualcomm Adreno 540 GPU and Qualcomm Hexagon 682-dsp and is optimized for low consumption. Qualcomm has again opted for a big.little arrangement of a cluster of four powerful and cluster of four energy-efficient cores.

The cluster of four powerful Kryo 280 cores runs at up to 2.4GHz, includes 2MB of L2 cache and performs 20 percent better in applications such as VR and web browsing. The frugal cluster runs at a maximum of 1.9GHz and contains 1MB L2 cache. The soc would run on the frugal cluster 80 percent of the time due to the Symphony System Manager’s aggressive distribution.

It is striking that the Kryo 280 cores were not designed from scratch by Qualcomm itself. These are semi-custom cores from ARM, where the previous Kryo generation came entirely from Qualcomm. This time, the company has taken an unknown ARM design and modified it at its discretion. ARM offers this capability with its ‘Built on ARM Cortex Technology’ platform.

The soc includes the Snapdragon X16 Gigabit LTE modem, support for 802.11ad for fast data transfer at short distances and there is 2×2 802.11ac network support with mu-mimo. In addition, the Snapdragon 835 is the first soc with the additional WCN 3990 chip that provides bluetooth 5.0 support.

The Snapdragon 835 supports Quick Charge 4.0, which charges 20 percent faster than Quick Charge 3.0, and finally, there’s a new technology called Q-Sync. As with Nvidia G-Sync and Freesync, the refresh rate of the image and the fps rendering of the GPU are matched, which should prevent stuttering and stuttering of the image.