Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and 660: What’s inside?

As you probably know already, the next Qualcomm Snapdragon flagship chipset has been made official jointly by Samsung and Qualcomm at a press event two days ago. The Snapdragon 835 chip marks Qualcomm's shift from the older 14nm process to the new 10nm FinFET process by Samsung, who will also be manufacturing all of the chips for Qualcomm in 2017.

According to a recently leaked spec sheet online, the MSM8998, aka the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC will be powered by an octa-core processor and the Adreno 540 GPU based on the company's own 64-bit Kryo 200 architecture. Support will be added for 4-channel LPDDR4X-1866 RAM and UFS 2.1 for internal storage. The 835 chip will also be compatible with LTE X16 modems with up to 1Gbps speed on LTE Cat.16.

Interestingly, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 SoC also came into focus via the same leak and was revealed to be an octa-core CPU as well. Instead of the Adreno 540 GPU, the 660 will be powered by a less powerful Adreno 512, but the sheet promisingly shows that the mid-range CPU is capable of being clocked as high as 2.2GHz. Unlike its more premium sibling, the SD 660 will be built on the 14nm FinFET LPP process by Samsung. It will support the X10 LTE modem, UFS 2.1 for internal storage and 2-channel LPDDR4X-1866 RAM.

As far as release dates are concerned, it looks like the Snapdragon 835 will make an early debut in the first quarter of 2017, while the Snapdragon 660 will be released later in Q2, 2017.

Saikat Kar (tech-enthusiast)