The upcoming smartphone processor is expected to power most of the smartphones in near future. Qualcomm has recently announced about its upcoming System-on-Chip (SoC), the Snapdragon 835. As most of the smartphones today run on Snapdragon processors, it is truly a big thing that is going to influence the smartphone market in a big way. Several high-end phones would feature it including Galaxy S8 and other brands like LG, HTC, Motorola and maybe even Google Pixel.
There are various features associated with this processor and it’s time to know the prominent ones among them. Let’s look at the most crucial aspects of the new chip, and how it is going to impact the upcoming phones.
It is tiny and powerful
It’s clear that chips are pretty small. The Snapdragon 835, despite being quicker and featuring more stuff, is relatively smaller.
The credit goes to a 10nm manufacturing process. Earlier the 820 was made using the already impressive 14nm process. In the case of 835, transistors are excellent for power consumption and are more precisely assembled. The latest Kyro 280 CPU carries four high-performance cores running up to 2.45GHz and four low-power cores running up to 1.9GHz, which should be faster than the CPU in the Snapdragon 820.
It supports better cameras
A lot of factors go into creating an excellent smartphone camera. When it comes to the image processing aspect, the Snapdragon 835 leads various crucial things much better than previous Qualcomm chips. It’s got dual 14-bit image signal processors (ISPs) that can manage either dual 16-megapixel cameras or a single 32-megapixel camera. Qualcomm has also improvised its software algorithms that further enhance zooming and image stabilization capabilities, and the 835 supports dual photodiode and improved hybrid autofocus.
It features amazing connectivity
The Snapdragon 835 incorporates Qualcomm’s new X16 LTE model. This simply indicates 256-QAM, 4x Carrier Aggregation, and 4×4 MIMO antennas. That’s LTE category 16 for downloads and 13 for uploads. Here, the point of discussion is around LTE download speeds of 1 gigabit and uploads of 150 megabits.
On the Wi-Fi part, you’re looking to get the support for 4×4 MU-MIMO supports on the integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter. Qualcomm mentions that the chip “supports” 802.11ad as well; which is superbly quicker multi-gigabit Wi-Fi technology. But the company doesn’t mean that 802.11ad modem is cohesive into the chip, similar to that with the 802.11ac modem. It’s possible that the chip just encompasses a path to support such external modems.
Enhanced 4K abilities
Besides the support for 4K displays, the new 835 chip supports extremely dynamic range and 10-bit color gamut. Those technologies are totally new in smartphones, but with the rise in 4K and HDR in TVs, there would be more phones and tablets with HDR and wide color gamut we can hope to see in 2017.
Faster and More Flexible Charging
This would be Qualcomm’s first chip to support its latest Quick Charge 4 technology (QC4). With this, five hours of “talk time” in five minutes of charging would become a reality for smartphone users. QC4 seems to be 20 to 30 percent more efficient to QC 3.
The first phone to use this processor will be released in coming few months.
