The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 should have been Qualcomm’s crowning achievement for 2015, and while it is a powerful SoC used by several flagship handsets, reports of it overheating have no doubt left a stain on Qualcomm’s reputation, so much so that some handset OEMs have opted for the more reliable Snapdragon 808, or in the case of Samsung opt to not use it entirely.
That being said, it seems that Qualcomm wants to put it all behind them and in a new post on their blog, the company has been extolling the virtues of its upcoming Snapdragon 820 SoC which is expected to make its way into devices come 2016. According to Qualcomm, they claim that the Snapdragon 820 will be twice as powerful and twice as energy efficient compared to its predecessor.
This is thanks to several factors, one of which is the Kyro CPU which has been tightly integrated with the Adreno 530 GPU and the Hexagon 680 DSP. Another reason for its power and efficiency comes from its 14nm FinFET technology which allows the processor to reach clock speeds of up to 2.2GHz. Of course whether or not phones really need that much power is a different story, but it’s available if they need to tap into it.
All of this sounds very promising and if the rumors are to believed, Samsung’s 2017 Galaxy S7 is rumored to pack the chipset along with the rumored HTC O2 smartphone. In any case we suppose benchmarks and real-life testing will need to be done to get a better feel of what it is capable of, but for now it sounds pretty good on paper.
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