Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 835 at CES
04 Jan 2017
Qualcomm on Tuesday unveiled the Snapdragon 835 at the CES, the next top-of the-line system-on-a chip, which is expected to be the most significant bits of 2017 hardware.
The 10nm chip is 35 per cent smaller than its predecessor, with size reduction of 3mm from each side, and thanks to its thumbnail size it can be embedded into stuff like augmented reality glasses, which also happens to be the first device featuring the Snapdragon 835.
The device is ODG's R-8 and R-9 AR glasses, but the problem is that the glasses are still too bulky and clunky to be called glasses.
According to commentators, they might, in a sense, be called ''compact'' and ''portable in the context of VR headsets, but they do not fit into shirt pockets and protrude a good couple of inches.
They add, whatever the product, headphones, glasses, watches, wearable technology cannot afford to neglect wearer's comfort. However, ODG glasses fail that test. What was worse was ODG planned to include modularity on the R-9 that invite partner companies to attach extra modules to the glasses and make them even less comfortable.
The cheaper of the two models would cost a little less than $1,000 while the heavier, which also has higher specs, would cost a little less than $1,000.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm has said that commercial devices running on Snapdragon 835 would be available in the first half of 2017 and this year's upcoming flagship devices could be expected to launch with Qualcomm's new chipset on board.
Unlike the quad-core Snapdragon 820/821, the new chipset features an octa-core Kryo 280, while continuing to use a big LITTLE architecture. This would allow four high performance cores to be clocked at up to 2.45GHz, while the other four ''Efficiency Cluster'' cores could be clocked at up to 1.9GHz. According to commentators, a notable aspect of the new Snapdragon 835 chipset was that Qualcomm had adopted the 10nm manufacturing process as against 14nm process earlier, which should improve both performance and power consumption.