Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 835, built on Samsung's 10nm process

Samsung Electronics originally announced that it was building the industry’s first 10nm mobile application processor back in October and today the company has confirmed that it is indeed manufacturing Qualcomm’s next generation Snapdragon processor. However, the processor breaks slightly from previous naming conventions, as it is called the Snapdragon 835, rather than the 830 that many had expected.

At a press event in New York, the two companies jointly announced that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 will be manufactured on Samsung’s cutting edge 10-nanometer FinFET process. This decision will bring both performance and energy efficiency improvements to Qualcomm’s next generation processor, when compared with the 14nm FinFET node from Samsung used for this year’s Snapdragon 820 and 821.

“Using the new 10nm process node is expected to allow our premium tier Snapdragon 835 processor to deliver greater power efficiency and increase performance while also allowing us to add a number of new capabilities that can improve the user experience of tomorrow’s mobile devices.”  – Keith Kressin, senior vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies

According to Samsung, the move to 10nm provides a 30 percent increase to area efficiency, combined with up to a 27 percent boost to performance or a 40 percent reduction in power consumption. Of course, these results will vary based on the processor’s architecture and real world usage, but these are nonetheless promising statistics for next year’s smartphones.

For Samsung, confirmation that it will be fulfilling orders for another generation of flagship Qualcomm processor, which will more than likely be powering a large number of flagship smartphones next year, is good news for Samsung Semiconductor.

The company’s semiconductor division has become an increasingly important contributor to Samsung’s profitability, as smartphone sales will take a hit this year following the Galaxy Note 7 saga and Galaxy smartphone sales growth has slowed.

Production of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 is already under way and the processor is expected to power a range of flagship smartphones that will appear in the first half of 2017.

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