14 DAY TRIAL // Qualcomm’s latest platform for smartphones is Snapdragon 835, expected to be featured in many flagship smartphones this year. But for the time being, Snapdragon 835 is in short supply, because of the imminent Galaxy S8 and S8+ release.
Once Samsung launches its new flagship, other smartphone makers will be able to equip their flagships with the new platform and release them to the market. We’ve seen the SD835 platform inside Galaxy S8 and S8+ perform benchmark tests and show quite impressive results.
On Geekbench, Snapdragon 835 tops the multi-core chart, performing better than the Huawei’s Kirin 960. This doesn’t come as a surprise, considering that SD835 has eight ARM-based cores, four modified Cortex-A73s and four unmodded A53s.
This provides increased performance, especially when compared to Kirin 960’s stock A73 and A53 cores. SD835’s single core performance is also high, but doesn’t surpass that of Kirin 960's by much.
Snapdragon 835 performs well in other benchmarks too
When it comes to AnTuTu’s benchmarking tests, Snapdragon 835 ranks first, but not far ahead of its predecessor, the SD821. Still, Snapdragon 835 platform incorporates a new graphics processing unit, Adreno 540 with 25% increased graphics performance compared to SD821. The improved GPU does edge out Huawei’s latest flagship, the P10, and smartphones running Snapdragon 821, like OnePlus 3T and Pixel XL, or devices that run SD820, like the Galaxy S7.
It’s worth mentioning that these results aren’t definitive, but they do point to the fact that Qualcomm’s latest platform brings major improvements.
Qualcomm is one of the biggest chipset makers out there and the company intends to expand even further, aiming at equipping more and more smartphones with SD835 in the second and third quarter of this year. A recent analysis points out that Qualcomm will edge out other high-end chips like MediaTek’s Helio X30.