After weeks of speculations, Qualcomm has finally unveiled the Snapdragon 821 SoC, the successor to the current Snapdragon 820.
According to the American chipset maker, the new Snapdragon 821 SoC brings improvements in almost every aspect, be it power saving, performance speed and lots of other things as compared to its predecessor. In the company’s words, the new chipset is “engineered” to deliver users with a 10% boost in terms of performance when compared to the Snapdragon 820.
Even though the American chipmaker claims that this new chipset is 10% faster than the current flagship chipset, the latest release still uses the same Kryo quad-core CPU that is used on the Snapdragon 820. However, the newer release has faster clock speeds of 2.4GHz as compared to the 2.2GHz the previous version can max. Apparently, the newly launched Snapdragon 821 will come with an MSM8996 Pro name.
Snapdragon 821-powered devices to start showing up soon
It has been rumored before that quite a number of handsets will be released with the new Snapdragon 821 SoC on board. However, these were just rumors back then since Qualcomm had not made any details public. Now that the chipset has been announced, it remains to be seen which devices will indeed ship with this SoC on board.
It has been rumored that Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will come with huge changes under the hood, with one of them being a new Snapdragon 821 SoC. The story has also been the same with respect to the upcoming Google Nexus 2016 phones. However, neither Qualcomm, Google nor Samsung has confirmed any of these reports. Still, the American chipmaker is adamant that devices based on the new SoC will start flooding the market during this second half of the year.
The company also adds that most of the features available on the Snapdragon 821 SoC are already available on the Snapdragon 820. These include support for download speeds of up to 600Mbps, enhanced call quality with Ultra HD Voice, 3X fast LTE uploads with Snapdragon Upload and so on.
In addition to being used with smartphones and tablets, Qualcomm says that the new Snapdragon 821 will also be used in newer technologies such as VR headsets.