Qualcomm, the company behind the powerful Snapdragons, announced today in New York the name of its newest SoC. It won’t be 830 as many thought, but 835. The 835 will replace the Snapdragon 820/821 at the top of its lineup. The bad thing is that the company didn’t reveal to us any specifics about what’s inside the Snapdragon 835, but it did learned two very interesting and important things.
Keith Kressin, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm, with Ben Suh, Senior Vice President of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Systems-LSI, took the stage in order to announce that the Snapdragon 835 will be using Samsung’s 10nm “10LPE” FinFET manufacturing node. We do not know the Snapdragon 835’s exact power or performance numbers yet, as they are not yet announced by the company. What we know from Samsung, is that the 10nm process will allow up to a 30% increase in area efficiency with 27% higher performance or up to 40% lower power consumption, number which are really very impressive. Also, only the switch from 14nm that the 820 are right now, to 10nm, will give the Snapdragon 835 a smaller die size than the Snapdragon 820 SoC, and should also help improve battery life very much.
The second thing that we know, is that the 835 will feature the firm’s new Quick Charge 4 technology. This new feature promises that 5 minutes of charge will give 5 hours usage to your mobile. That’s enough to get you through a couple of movies at least, or a whole lot of albums. IF you are charging your mobile for 15 minutes, mobiles with Quick Charge 4-enabled should be able to reach 50% of charge, said Qualcomm, where Quick Charge 3 is currently able to charge a phone to 80% capacity in 35 minutes. And if we take under consideration that phone batteries take on charge more slowly as the charge state rises, this looks to be a significant improvement over the previous generation.
Qualcomm is also building in a set of new safety measures. They will be designed in a way to prevent over-charging, overheating and spontaneous immolation. It will also support the USB PD (power delivery) standard, which through USB Type-C ports will allow users to charge their smartphones using any compliant charger.
The Snapdragon 835 is already in mass production and on schedule to appear in commercial devices during the first half of 2017.