Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 unveiled: The most powerful mobile chip yet

We knew it was coming and now it's official. Qualcomm has publicly detailed the specifics of their latest flagship chip, the Snapdragon 835. It will allow smartphone manufacturers to utilize better technology and equipments in the mobile phones of 2017 in terms of photography, machine learning and displays.

The CPU in the 835 chip is an octa-core, semi-custom Kryo 280 CPU core design with possible ARM Cortex-A73 cores powering it. The Kryo 280 system is divided into four cores with 1.9GHz clock speed for efficiency and four cores with 2.45GHz clock speed for performance. Take a look at the image below to understand some of the differences between the SD 835, the SD 821 and the SD 820.

Apart from providing a boost of about 20% over the SD 820, the SD 835 will also allow for much better battery efficiency. Qualcomm expects that around 80% of all the tasks usually performed by a smartphone will be handled by the comparatively low-powered CPU cores, thereby providing an additional two and a half hour of battery life, as compared to the SD 820. Let's not forget that all of this has a lot to do with Samsung's 10nm FinFET process, on which the new chips are being built.

The Adreno 540 GPU is similar to the Adreno 530 in architecture, but the faster trilinear filtering and GPGPU compute will lead to a 25% performance boost over the older GPU. In terms of display, it can support 10-bit color at 4K resolution with a constant 60fps frame rate. The Adreno 540 GPU can now handle 107.4 million colors (previously 16.8 million) as well. In summary, we would say that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 is the most powerful and revolutionary mobile chip yet. If you are interested in more technical details, check it out here.

Saikat Kar (tech-enthusiast)