Snapdragon 835 to bring even faster charging, better performance

Enlarge / On the left, Qualcomm Vice President for Product Management Keith Kressin. On the right, Samsung Senior Vice President for Foundry Marketing, Ben Suh. In their hands, the ever-so-tiny Snapdragon 835 processors. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm's next flagship system-on-chip will be the Snapdragon 835, the company announced today, superseding the Snapdragon 821 and 820 found in today's hardware.

The company didn't say a lot about what makes the new chip tick, but it has confirmed a few details. It will be built on Samsung's 10nm 10LPE FinFET manufacturing process, in contrast to the 14nm process used on the 821. Samsung says that the 10nm process can enable some combination of up to a 30 percent reduction in die size, 27 percent more performance, or 40 percent lower power consumption. Qualcomm didn't offer performance or power comparisons between the 835 and 821, but we'd expect it to be somewhat faster and use somewhat less power.

The one feature that Qualcomm did confirm is the latest version of its Quick Charge technology. Until now, Quick Charge has been a proprietary tech that enables delivering high voltage and current over USB cables in order to charge the battery faster. To do this, it relied on non-standard signaling and non-standard use of the connections in a USB cable. This raised various incompatibility issues, so much so that Google strongly discouraged Quick Charge support in its latest Android Compatibility Definition Document.