Qualcomm’s flagship chip for 2017, the Snapdragon 835, has been teased numerous times by the company since the beginning of this year, but devices powered by the chipset are still at least a month away from being released to the market.

Qualcomm has already provided official performance improvement percentage numbers for the Snapdragon 835, but like always, marketing claims don’t always match up in real world benchmarks. A preliminary Snapdragon 835 performance preview posted by AnandTech, however, shows just how impressive (or disappointing) Qualcomm’s latest and greatest chipset is and how it stacks up against the competition.

Before we jump to the numbers, it is important to note that the four ‘big’ performance oriented Kyro cores inside the Snapdragon 835 are slightly modified variants of ARM’s Cortex-A73 cores. Utilising ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, the low-power cores are also a variation of ARM’s Cortex-A53 cores. This is in stark contrast to the original Kyro chipset found inside the Snapdragon 820/821 which were custom designed ARM cores from Qualcomm.

This means that the performance of the CPU inside the Snapdragon 835 chip is going to be largely the same as other chipsets in the market that utilise ARM’s Cortex-A73 cores. When talking purely about the performance of the CPU and comparing it to previous Snapdragon chipsets, the Snapdragon 835’s Kryo CPU shows decent improvements in multi-core benchmarks where it sits at the top of the charts, though single core benchmarks show that the IPC of the new CPU cores has only improved marginally. It is also important to note that in single threaded floating point benchmarks, the Snapdragon 835 actually posted scores lower than the Snapdragon 821 by anywhere from 5% to 51%.

In overall system benchmarks like PCMark though, the Snapdragon 835 sits right at the top of the charts.

It’s the Adreno 540 GPU of the Snapdragon 835 that manages to surprise with its performance, but then again the performance of its Adreno GPUs have always been one of the strengths of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips.

While the Adreno 540 shares the same architecture as the Adreno 530 GPU found inside the Snapdragon 820/821, improvements to its ALU and drivers lead to a 25 percent increase in 3D rendering performance. In benchmarks, the Adreno 540 shows its prowess and sits right at the top of the chart beating even the Apple’s A10 GPU by a significant margin. The benchmarks show that the Adreno 540 GPU is faster than its predecessor by anywhere between 15 to 40 percent, which is a respectable year-on-year gain in performance.

Performance is only one aspect of the Snapdragon 835 chipset. Since the chipset is based on the 10nm LPE fab from Samsung, it should also be more power efficient and run cooler than the Snapdragon 821 chipset.

Do remember that these are just benchmarks and while the numbers posted by the Snapdragon 835 look impressive, it is better to reserve your judgement once the first Snapdragon 835-powered devices make their way to the market.