Qualcomm Unveils 10nm Snapdragon 835 SoC

Since the rise of the mobile sector, the bleeding edge of technology has shifted away from the traditional markets. Gone are the days where the latest fabrication nodes went to CPUs and GPUs first. Today, the mobile SoC is often the first mass produced chip on new process nodes. As part of the ramping up of Samsung’s new 10nm node, Qualcomm has announced their new Snapdragon 835 SoC on that process.

So far, Qualcomm has remained mum on the details for the Snapdragon 835. Given the major model number change, I suspect we will be seeing some kind of major work either in core layout/count or architecture. What we do know is that the new 10nm process from Samsung promises “30% increase in area efficiency with 27% higher performance or up to 40% lower power consumption”. This will likely lead to better clocks, lower power consumption and cheaper SoCs overall. I suspect the GPU has also received a nice bump in performance.

According to the roadmap thus far, the Snapdragon 835 will arrive in devices in the first half of 2017. This means we’ll probably see it in the Samsung, LG, Sony, HTC and other’s flagships of the year. I would not be surprised to see another incremental update later in the year as well.