Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 835 Soc is fast and Qualcomm's touted improvements during the official annoucnement of the platform seems to be accurate.

The Snapdragon 835 is a semi-custom ARM Cortex design for Qualcomm based on Qualcomm's big.Little design approach, with 4 low power ARM cores clocked at up to 1.8GHz and 4 high performance cores that can scale up to 2.45GHz. Qualcomm claims significant gains in power efficiency with this architecture versus its previous gen full-custom Snapdragon 820 series, noting that roughly 80 percent of the time users will get work done on those low power cores. The chip is also built on Samsung's 10nm FinFET technology and consumes 25 percent less power overall with a 35 percent smaller package size. Battery life claims are also promising, although not yet confirmed.

Qualcomm has provided a testing environment at its San Diego headquarters, and some online media had the chance to test the nwe chip against two Snapdragon 821 devices, the Google's Pixel XL and OnePlus OnePlus 3; the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, which pack Samsung's Exynos processor; and Huawei's Kirin 960-powered P10.

According to the benchmarks published by Android Police, the Snapdragon 835 outperformed the Snapdragon 821 by 40 percent in multithreaded processor tasks in Geekbench and PCMark.

In Geekbench, the 835's single-thread performance remained high besting every processor by at least 10 percent. In PCMark, it scored 10 percent higher than the Huawei P10's Kirin 960.

The GFXBench GL and 3D Mark aps test the 835's Adreno 540 graphics chip. On average, it maintained around a 30 percent lead on the Snapdragon 821 in GFXBench GL's suite of tests and did 30 percent better than competing graphics chips in 3DMark's Ice Storm Unlimited test. In 3D Mark's OpenGL ES3.0 Slingshot Unlimited, the new chip maintained a 50 percent lead on the Snapdragon 821.

Antutu, a suite that factors RAM, GPU, CPU, and storage speed into benchmarking tests, showed the 835 well ahead of the competition. Web tests, which show how well the 835 handles graphics-heavy pages, told a similar story. Google's Octane test showed a 40 percent advantage over Samsung's Exynos processor, and 50 percent over the 821. Sunspider and Kraken, meanwhile, awarded the 835 similar wins.

The first Snapdragon 835 devices are expected to in the first half of 2017.