Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 benchmarks are out, and while the chip was already announced to come with many improvements compared with the current brood and the competition, these results give a better idea of what's in store.
To be clear, the upcoming processor — or "mobile platform," as the company wants it to be called moving forward — is the successor of the widely used Snapdragon 821, which powers some of the most popular phones of today such as the Google Pixel and the OnePlus 3T.
Snapdragon 835 Benchmarks: Chip To Dominate The Competition
First things first, these findings come from Android Police's David Ruddock, who was invited to go to Qualcomm's campus in San Diego to take a closer look at the Snapdragon 835 and, of course, run benchmarks.
What happened was a Snapdragon 835 reference platform (running Android 7.1.1) went head-to-head against the Pixel XL (Android 7.1.1) and OnePlus 3T (Android 7.0), which both have Snapdragon 821; the Samsung Galaxy S7 with Exynos 8890 (Android 6.0.1); the Galaxy S7 edge (Android 7.0) with Snapdragon 820; and the Huawei P10 (Android 7.0) with Kirin 960.
Ruddock notes that the Galaxy S7 and P10 may not have been ideal devices to include because of its OS version and its preproduction status respectively, but he says adding them to the mix will still prove to be useful for a better picture of the chip.
To start things off, the Snapdragon 835 blows the competition out of the water in Geekbench, notably beating the Snapdragon 821 in the multicore test by 40 percent.
Next, there's PCMark version 1.0, and just like Geekbench, it's a platform that can measure a processors' raw performance. While it's not as impressive as the results in Geekbench, it still comes out on top, and to be exact, it got a score that's 10 percent higher than the P10's Kirin 960.
As for the Adreno 540 GPU, both benchmarking apps GFXBench and 3DMark are singing a similar tune. In GFXBench, the Snapdragon 835 had a 30 percent lead average over the Snapdragon 821.
But in 3DMark, it beat the Snapdragon 821 by about a whopping 50 percent on the GL ES 3.0 version and by 40 percent on the GL ES 3.1.
In 3DMark's Ice Storm Unlimited, it also triumphed over the second placer OnePlus 3T by 30 percent.
Last but not least is AnTuTu, the holistic benchmark software that includes CPU, RAM, and GPU in the tests. To no one's surprise, the Snapdragon 835 conquered the competition, scoring more than 181,000.
However, Ruddock points out that this doesn't really say much since the reference platform's storage type is unclear.
Other Snapdragon 835 Improvements In Tow
Snapdragon 835 isn't all about pure performance and the numbers, as it's also coming with a few improved features.
For starters, there's the Quick Charge 4.0, and according to Qualcomm's press release, it'll provide 20 percent faster charging and 30 percent higher energy efficiency. In other words, five minutes of charging can deliver five hours' worth of juice.
In terms of connectivity, it'll sport a Gigabit-Class LTE modem, and it's touted to be the first commercial chip that'll be ready for Gigabit LTE networks.
Long story short, the Snapdragon 835 is a beast to behold, and it's coming to dominate the competition.
However, it may not be widely available at first since Samsung is hoarding supplies, which may have had a hand in LG's decision to turn to the Snapdragon 821 for the G6 instead. That means the anticipated Galaxy S8 may be the only phones the Snapdragon 835 will power for some time.
