When it announced the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm promised that the latest in its family of ARM systems-on-chips would boost performance by 27 percent with a 40 percent reduction in power consumption. The first early benchmarks of the processor that Qualcomm doesn't want us to call a processor have been run and the results are... well, they're a little uneven.

Anandtech went to Qualcomm's San Diego headquarters and was shown the 835 running in a hardware platform reference—a basic smartphone built around the chip that serves as a platform for hardware testing and software development. During this visit, they were able to run a handful of basic benchmarks to gauge the performance of the new chip.

Naively, one would assume that Snapdragon 835 would be faster than the 820/821 that went before it. 835 is, after all, a higher number than 820, and higher numbers usually mean better when it comes to processors. But the situation with the 835 is more complicated than that. In the early days of the modern smartphone era, Qualcomm's 32-bit ARM Snapdragon chips were generally best-in-class. While many ARM chips use core designs that are developed by ARM itself in the UK, Qualcomm did something different; it had a pair of custom designs, Scorpion in 2008 and Krait in 2012, developed in house. These designs were broadly superior to ARM's Cortex-A8, A9, and A15 designs that other companies were using.

However, the transition to 64-bit caught the company off guard. Qualcomm was working on a 64-bit design, but, spurred on by Apple's embrace of 64-bit ARM in its custom-designed chips, the entire industry rushed to add "64-bit" to its spec sheet. Without enough time to finish its custom design, Qualcomm's first 64-bit parts, 2014's Snapdragon 810 and 808, were built using ARM designs; specifically, the Cortex-A57 and A53. These chips did continue to include Qualcomm-designed components—the Adreno GPU, Hexagon DSP, image processor, and modem were all Qualcomm's own work—but CPU-wise, they had nothing to distinguish them from any other chip built around the A53 and A57.

Qualcomm's first 64-bit custom design, named Kryo, didn't ship in phones until early 2016. Kryo powered the Snapdragon 820 and 821. For the most part, 820 was indeed faster than 810, with a solid lead in integer performance and a more substantial one in floating point performance.

But 835 doesn't build on Kryo's design. While Qualcomm is calling the CPU portion of the 835 "Kryo 280," it is in fact a reversion to an ARM design—at least in part. In the past, ARM's approach to its core designs was that a chip maker either uses the design as-is (a Cortex license) or builds their own custom design from scratch (an ARM architecture license). But the company now has a new kind of license, named "Built on ARM Cortex Technology" that allows companies to start with a Cortex design as the base, and then request that ARM customize it in certain ways. ARM retains ownership of the modifications, but promises not to share them with any of its other customers. The scope for customization is limited—for example, enlarging the instruction window to support more out-of-order instructions would be possible, but adding extra execution resources would not—but allows greater tailoring than was previously possible.

Kryo 280 uses this new licensing scheme. Qualcomm didn't reveal what the underlying Cortex design was, though it's believed to be the A73. The company also didn't say how the design was customized except to mention that the memory controller is Qualcomm's own. But what it means is that the processor has little relationship to its namesake predecessor, and is now much more comparable to other Cortex-based chips, such as Huawei's Kirin 960, which uses the Cortex-A73 design unmodified.

Faster in some places, slower in others

Compared to the Snapdragon 821, most facets of integer performance have improved, often by a substantial margin of 40 to 60 percent. Certain tasks, however, show regressions, particularly those around image processing. The Kirin 960 shows a similar performance profile, hence the belief that Qualcomm is using A73 as the basis for its design. Overall, 835's integer performance appears to be a couple of percent better than Kirin 960/stock Cortex-A73, and 22 percent over Kryo, on a per-megahertz basis.

For floating point, however, the story is rather different. Kryo was a strong floating point performer, and in the Geekbench 4 floating point tests, Qualcomm's custom design is faster in almost every workload. The new chip is, overall, some 23 percent down on the old one, on a per megahertz basis.

In GPU tests, Qualcomm's Adreno family continues to differentiate itself, and outperform, ARM's Mali family. It often pulls ahead of the iPhone 7 Plus, too. Compared to 820, Qualcomm is claiming a 25 percent increase in GPU performance, with about 14 percent coming from a boosted clock speed.

For most smartphone workloads, Qualcomm has probably made a pretty sound trade-off; better integer performance is simply more useful for tasks such as Web browsing than better floating point performance. Anandtech shows the 835 platform reference performs slightly ahead of the Kirin 960-powered Huawei Mate 9, and in standard browser-based tests, both eclipse the Snapdragon 820. Even the regressions around image processing workloads may not be tremendously meaningful; the 835 contains dedicated image processing hardware, and it's this, rather than the main CPU, that should be called into action for photography and video recording applications. Such coprocessors are ignored by standard CPU and GPU benchmarks, so although the benchmark scores are not wrong per se they don't necessarily represent the full user experience.

The other big promise made of the 835 was greatly reduced power consumption, thanks to the use of Samsung's 10nm manufacturing process. Meaningful testing of power usage is going to have to wait for real hardware rather than reference systems, but Qualcomm did demonstrate lower power usage when compared to the Snapdragon 820 when running a virtual reality workload.