Snapdragon 835 vs. Snapdragon 821: How much of an upgrade is it?
The shift to 10nm with the Snapdragon 835 represents a huge leap in performance.
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:
| Node | 10nm FinFET (LPE) | 14nm FinFET (LPP) |
| CPU | Four 2.45GHz Kryo 280 coresFour 1.9GHz Kryo 280 cores | Two 2.35GHz Kryo coresTwo 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 LPDDR4X1866MHz29.8GB/s | Dual-channel LPDDR41866MHz29.8GB/s |
| Storage | eMMC 5.1UFS 2.1 | eMMC 5.1UFS 2.0 |
| Camera | Dual ISP up to 32MP16MP dual camera | Dual ISP up to 28MP |
| Modem | X16 gigabit LTEDownload up to 1000Mbit/secUpload up to 150Mbit/sec | X12 LTEDownload up to 600Mbit/secUpload 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.
AIVAnet 