Surprise: newer chip is faster than older chips! Sometimes a lot faster. Sometimes a little. I try not to take benchmarks too seriously, because they are definitively unreal experiences - there's very little they tell us that guarantees a particular user experience when a piece of hardware technology is implemented in a consumer product.
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Of course, we can draw some basic conclusions: the Snapdragon 835 probably isn't going to set the world on fire with its single-core performance, which seems just marginally better, though the switch from 4 cores last year to 8 this year will almost definitely benefit multithreaded workloads. The shrink to a 10nm process will make the chip more efficient while doing the same work when compared to a Snapdragon 821, as well.
I think the Adreno 540 is also very considerably faster than the GPU in the 820-series Snapdragons, though Qualcomm was completely mum on how those gains were achieved. We don't even know if it has more core clusters - Qualcomm keeps Adreno under a pretty tight lock and key, so we'll have to wait for microscopic and x-ray analysis to really learn anything about that side of things, probably.
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