That, plus the smart handling and scheduling of tasks and processes on the CPU level makes Qualcomm confident enough to advertise a solid 24-hour talk time. Qualcomm will be showcasing the Snapdragon 835 SoC on January 6 during CES 2017, which will be powering this year’s high-end smartphones, like the new Samsung Galaxy S8, ASUS ZenFone, and LG G6.
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Even at the low-end of the market, the phones the Snapdragon 600 series devices were super.
Think again. At chipmaker Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Technology Summit in NY and the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, the firm unveiled its most impressive silicon yet: The Snapdragon 835.
According to the leaked information, the Snapdragon 835 uses “a new 10nm design with more than three billion ultra-efficient transistors”.
Instead, most developers will use the DSP indirectly by integrating vendor-specific libraries for VR/AR/Audio, etc… in fact, developers don’t always know which compute unit (DSP, GPU, CPU) will be used, and it’s up to the chip maker’s library to decide.
Moreover, Qualcomm designed the Snapdragon 835 to meet VR demands with strict thermal and power constraints. Utilizing its shiny new Adreno 540 GPU, the Snapdragon 835 promises a smoother VR experience nearly comparable, though not quite, to standalone VR systems.
The company breaks the device’s feature set up into five pillars – battery life, immersion (VR/AR), capture (camera), connectivity (WiFi/LTE) and security – so let’s do the same here, for the sake of simplicity. “We think that AR will be bigger than VR, and it follows VR in taking off”.
All of this fits into an extremely small chip (35% smaller than 820) that is manufactured using Samsung’s 10nm process, making it faster and more efficient (25% less power than 820) than ever. However, it is important to remember that a GPU also includes 2D video stream processing units that are used for movie processing, and potentially for GPU-based general objective computations.
With virtual reality gaining momentum, the Snapdragon 835 offers low-latency (15ms motion-to-photon latency) and six-degrees-of-freedom for precise motion tracking. Phones based on this chip will also record 4K HDR video with electronic image stabilization, Qualcomm says. The new GPU also enables 4K HDR10 video on 10-bit displays, so every piece of the puzzle is in place when it comes to color fidelity. A new generation of hybrid autofocus system on the Snapdragon strives to ensure that phones using this chipset don’t miss or are slow to focus on an object. It supports theoretical download speeds up to 10 times faster than first-generation 4G LTE devices, and 802.11ad wireless networks. It supports upto 4x carrier aggregation for optimised peak throughput.
The Snapdragon 835 also runs Qualcomm’s hardware-based Haven security platform, which has a secure execution environment for user authentication and device attestation.
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Having multiple image sensors on the same surface also gives a device depth perception, Tim Leland, Qualcomm’s VP of product management pointed out. Super-thin handsets will be as fast as PCs, LTE data transfers could be faster than a wired internet connection, and virtual reality will be in the palm of your hand.
