Qualcomm Positions New Snapdragon 835 Mobile Processor Toward AR and VR

According to a leaked blog post, Qualcomm, one of the world’s leading semiconductor companies, has today announced that their latest SoC (system on chip) is not only 30% smaller, 27% more powerful and 40% more efficient then previous designs, it’s also designed to power next generation mobile VR and AR experiences.

Qualcomm powers a large percentage of the world’s mobile devices, with its Snapdragon processors the company often leads the way in both miniaturisation, power efficiency and raw grunt in the mobile field. All of this according to a leaked blog post published by tipster Evan Bass.

Update: The Snapdragon 835 is now officially announced corroborating details in this story.

At CES 2017, the company are set to announce their latest product, the Snapdragon 835. Built using a new Samsung 10nm manufacturing process, the new system on chip has achieved significant power efficiency gains over the previous Snapdragon 820 design. Qualcomm are saying the 835 now uses 40 percent less power than the 820 whilst also managing to increase performance by up to 27%. This means of course longer battery life and cooler running.

However, keen to ensure it’s new technology is positioned to ride the wave of an emergent mobile virtual reality market, Qualcomm state that the new Snapdragon 835 amps up its VR and AR rendering performance offering 25% gains on 3D graphics rendering whilst still falling within “strict thermal and power constraints.” Perhaps as interesting though are Qualcomm’s claims that the new SoC can deliver a reduction in motion to photon latency processing 6 DoF motion tracking. All achieved “by a heterogeneous computing approach that isolates different parts of Snapdragon 835 for audio, video, and motion functions, delivering the best user experience and the most efficient processing.”

With the mobile phone powered Android Daydream platform now launched and countless other portable or tether free VR and AR projects on the horizon, it makes complete sense that Qualcomm would pitch its evolving technology to ensure capabilities in these areas. Precisely which devices will receive the new SoC and whether it will enable hardware based upon it to pass Google’s Daydream hardware certification program is unknown at this stage. We’ll be watching the rest of CES 2017 unfold for news on this.