Tantalising details of Qualcomm's latest flagship Snapdragon 835 chip have appeared online, suggesting the upcoming Galaxy S8 could feature the powerful new processor.
A leaked spec table, posted to Chinese microblogging website Weibo, suggests the Snapdragon 835 chip will use an octa-core 'Kyro 200' CPU. While the specific clock speed is still unknown, this will almost certainly be higher than the 3.2GHz found in the Snapdragon 830.
The table also suggests that the new chip, with model number "MSM 8998", will power Samsung's to-be-announced Galaxy S8 phone. It will also feature the Adreno 540 GPU, 4GB of LPDDR RAM and Qualcomm's top of the line X16 modem, which can reach up to 1GB download speeds.
It will come as no surprise to learn that the new 835 chips will be developed using Qualcomm's new efficient 10nm technology, which allows processors to be 27% more powerful at 40% reduced power consumption.
The leak seems to dismiss claims that the US version of the S8 would feature the Snapdragon 830, with the Exynos 8895 SoC powering devices released elsewhere.
What is also unsurprising is that the table suggests the S8 will be revealed at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress tradeshow in 2017, which is common for new Samsung devices.
06/10/2016: Reports suggest that Samsung will be the sole manufacturer of the upcoming Snapdragon 830 chipset from Qualcomm.
The new chip will be built with a 10nm process and will be used in half of the Galaxy S8 devices, the other half using the Exynos 8895 SoC, according to ETNews.
This follows a similar approach Samsung used this year with its Galaxy S7 phones, using the Snapdragon 820 chipset exclusively in US models.
There are also rumours that the Korean tech giant will initiate a new chip development process to reduce production costs. This 'Fan-out Panel Level Package' technology promises to remove the need for printed circuit boards in the package substrate.
Most importantly this newer process has the potential to increase power-efficiency, which is essential for newer, battery-hungry devices. This should also reduce the risk of over-heating, which troubled last year's 810.
The smaller 10nm process should ensure an increased performance for the 830 compared to the current 14nm 820.
Google recently revealed that its new Pixel handsets would be launching with the Snapdragon 821, a 10% performance increase on the older 820 chipset.
Recent leaks of Samsung S8 device specs point to a seriously powerful phone. If correct, we could be looking at a 3.2GHz octa-core processor with 6GB of RAM to boot.
Picture: Snapdragon S4
