First tests Snapdragon 835 show significant performance gains

By admin On Mar 22, 2017

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The first benchmarks of the Snapdragon 835, the soc that should come in most high-end smartphones this year, show that the soc performs significantly better than the Snapdragon 821. The GPU performance in particular seems to improve. With single-threaded work, the profit is limited.

Qualcomm has sent some reference smartphones with the Snapdragon 835 to various review sites. The device had 6GB of RAM and a screen resolution of 2560×1440 pixels. The operating system is Android 7.1.1.

In the multithreaded test of GeekBench 4.0, the Snapdragon 835 scores 40 percent better than its predecessor, the Snapdragon 821, according to Android Police. At Antutu, the difference is 35 percent and the iPhone 7 is also surpassed here, PC Advisor notes.

PC Perspective also tested how the Adreno 540 of the Snapdragon 835 compares to the Adreno 530 of the Snapdragon 821. With 3DMark Slingshot ES 3.1, the gain for the newcomer is 30 percent compared to the Adreno 530 and the ARM G71MP8 GPU of Huawei’s Kirin 960 On GFXBench Manhattan ES 3.0, the 835 scores 31 percent better than the 821 and 39 percent better than Apple’s A10 Fusion.

AnandTech publishes the most comprehensive results and provides insight into single-threaded performance, among other things. That paints a somewhat mixed picture. For example, there is a gain with most, but not all integer operations of Geekbench 4. The Snapdragon 835 loses out to the 821 in the floating point calculations. At PCMark, the Snapdragon 835 has a slight advantage over the Kirin 960. The biggest graphics gain is seen at 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme, where the Adreno 540 scores 30 percent higher than its competitors.

Qualcomm claims to have made improvements in the area of battery life in particular. This would be partly due to the switch from a 14nm production process to a 10nm variant. Battery tests have not yet been able to run the review sites, but Qualcomm did show that the consumption of the reference smartphone with Snapdragon 835 was 3.56W and that of the 821 at 4.6W.

Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 835 in January. The soc contains four Qualcomm-customized A73 cores, which the company calls Kryo 280, supplemented by four economical semi-custom A53 cores. The soc includes a Snapdragon X16 Gigabit LTE modem and support for 802.11ad, bluetooth 5.0 and Quick Charge 4.0.