Qualcomm Announces Next-Generation Snapdragon 835 SoC Using Samsung’s 10nm Node
by Matt Humrick on November 17, 2016 7:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- Snapdragon 835
Qualcomm revealed the name of its newest SoC, the Snapdragon 835, at its Snapdragon Technology Summit in New York today. The new SoC replaces the Snapdragon 820/821 at the top of its lineup. While Qualcomm is not yet ready to disclose the specifics about what’s inside the Snapdragon 835, it did confirm one important detail.
Keith Kressin (left) and Ben Suh (right) holding Snapdragon 835, the first 10nm SoC
Keith Kressin, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm, took the stage with Ben Suh, Senior Vice President of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Systems-LSI, to announce that the Snapdragon 835 will use Samsung’s 10nm "10LPE" FinFET manufacturing node. We do not know the Snapdragon 835’s power or performance numbers yet, but according to Samsung its 10nm process “allows up to a 30% increase in area efficiency with 27% higher performance or up to 40% lower power consumption.” The switch from 14nm to 10nm, along with other changes, give the Snapdragon 835 a smaller die size than the Snapdragon 820 SoC, and should also help improve battery life.
The Snapdragon 835 is already in mass production and on schedule to appear in commercial devices during the first half of 2017.
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name99 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
That would be my guess.830 is planned, then Samsung is willing to promise 10nm faster than expected (or 830 delayed longer than expected) so a quick rearrangement gives an 835 as 830 recompiled down to 10nm.
As for improvements, people can sneer that there's "nothing new" (and as an Apple fan, I'll be the first to sneer at anyone else's CPU...) but there's more to a SoC than just the CPU. At the very least they've probably stuffed in more GPU transistors, so better performance there; likewise probably a better ISP (faster HDR, perhaps various image fusion from two camera lenses); more of their on-going neural-network/AI stuff (which will take software to surface, but may lead to things like better speech recognition?), probably video support for larger size (I don't know where they're at now, but if they can handle 4K@30p it'll go up to 4K@60p, etc).
It is ALWAYS the case (and the Internet, being a hyperactive three year ALWAYS forgets) that, yes, if you have last year's phone, this year's phone does not look THAT special (and same for phone SoCs). Guess what, new phones are not AIMED at you, they're meant to be a good upgrade to people with two year old phones, and a great upgrade for three year old phones...
tuxRoller - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Going by their history I'd say we won't get a new dsp (I suppose it's possible, but the 680 is a brand new design and it can already handle the de-parallaxed image processing tasks from two sensors---they might up the frequency a bit, however, but I don't know how much wiggle room they have with this arch).I think adreno is actually a possible candidate for a redesign as the 5xx didn't differ greatly from the 4xx, iirc.
As we know they are updating their quick charge to v4 ("5MIN GIVES YOU 5HOURS!!!!!"), which will be used by someone, probably.
Their memory controller is ripe for an update, imho, simply because of their "upcoming" arm server core offering. As it now stands, their memory controller is great at one thing: media-like workloads. In fact, I wonder how much they are holding back their cores with that design choice....
Perhaps support for lpddr4x? Is that even available yet?
Aside from the cpu (which, again, history suggests will be a refinement of kryo rather than something wholly new) I'm going with the gpu as the component most likely to change. Yeah, is love to see with done on the mmu but my pessimism is telling me "NO!".
lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
The 830 was also rumored to be built on 10nm... I don't believe the "5" in the model number is indicative of a process shrink.lilmoe - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
That's anyone's guess. The 800 and 805 were on the same process node. Rumor has it that Samsung has co-designed the 835 with Qualcomm. The 830 probably had some particular shortcomings, was dropped entirely, and replaced with the 835 due to Samsung's involvement.Who knows...
systemBuilder - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
You forgot the Snapdragon 822, so very, very different from the 820, that they added a +2.Ironchef3500 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Wish I could get excited. Just havent been really impressed since the 800,801 days. Dont know what the deal is....darkich - Friday, November 18, 2016 - link
My sentiments also.The SD 800 was one of the best SoC's ever, and neither one of its successors came close to living up to that.
Azurael - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Meh, wonder whether they've got per-core performance back on par with the stock Arm IP?It would have been interesting to see how SD810 would have worked ported to 14nm. I have a distinct feeling it might have been faster than the Kryo-based SD820 that got released, even without replacing the A57s with A72/3 IP.
Moizy - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Hmm, interesting, would have been interesting to compare 810 to 820 on the same node. However, wasn't the A57-based Exynos in the Galaxy S6/Note 5 (forget the chip numbering) based on a 14nm process (not sure which step)? That chip, apart from the GPU, was essentially an 810 on 14nm, right?Moizy - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Each 8xx series chip has a lot of hope and hype, but then it always fails to match whatever Ax chip in the newest iPhone from 6 months before, especially on compute. I'm an Android guy, not an Apple fan, but I just hope the Kirin or Exynos chips can proliferate, and that Google can internally develop their own custom core that can outperform this. Alas, I'm sure most every Android flagship next year will have this chip, but it will probably not equal A73-based SoCs, Samsung's custom core, and the A10. I want that performance in a good Android device.