Qualcomm formally detailed the Snapdragon 835 during its CES keynote, serving up a look at what's new in this year's flagship SoC. The Snapdragon 835 offers improvements across the board, and Qualcomm has incorporated a slew of new features, including Bluetooth 5, gigabit LTE, 802.11ad Wi-Fi, and much more.

The 14nm Snapdragon 820/821 was no slouch, but the move to the 10nm node has allowed Qualcomm to register huge gains in energy efficiency and performance. The Snapdragon 835 is 27% faster while consuming 40% less energy, with the overall size being 30% smaller than the previous generation. Here's a look at some of the key areas where the SoC differs from last year's offering:

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Category Snapdragon 835 Snapdragon 821
Node 10nm FinFET (LPE) 14nm FinFET (LPP)
CPU Four 2.45GHz Kryo 280 cores
Four 1.9GHz Kryo 280 cores		 Two 2.35GHz Kryo cores
Two 1.6GHz Kryo cores
GPU Adreno 540
(OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.0, DirectX 12)		 Adreno 530
(OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.0, DirectX 11.2)
Memory Dual-channel LPDDR4X
1866MHz
29.8GB/s		 Dual-channel LPDDR4
1866MHz
29.8GB/s
Storage eMMC 5.1
UFS 2.1		 eMMC 5.1
UFS 2.0
Camera Dual ISP up to 32MP
16MP dual camera		 Dual ISP up to 28MP
Modem X16 gigabit LTE
Download up to 1000Mbit/sec
Upload up to 150Mbit/sec		 X12 LTE
Download up to 600Mbit/sec
Upload up to 150Mbit/sec
Bluetooth Bluetooth 5 Bluetooth 4.2
Wi-Fi 802.11ad multi-gigabit Wi-Fi 802.11ac gigabit Wi-Fi
Charging Quick Charge 4.0 Quick Charge 3.0


We'll have to wait until the Snapdragon 835 makes its way to consumer devices — which is slated to be sometime later this quarter — before we can take a detailed look at how it fares next to last year's Snapdragon 820/821. However, based on the hardware and the node shrink, it looks like it will be another good year for Qualcomm in the high-end mobile SoC space.

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