Snapdragon 821, The New Blue Eyed Chip

Designed to complement and extend the strengths of the Snapdragon 800 line-up

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor is one of the most powerful smartphone chips in the market at the moment, but there’s mounting evidence that a faster version is on its way to the market pretty soon.

A few months ago, rumours started making the rounds that Qualcomm is soon going to introduce a new chip called the Snapdragon 821 or 823. But Qualcomm wasn’t saying anything.

Recently, Asus may have spilled the beans, in the specification sheets of the company’s upcoming Zenfone 3 Deluxe, where Asus mentioned that the phablet will be available with two different chip options: Snapdragon 820 or Snapdragon 821.

So now the question is: What is the difference between the two processors releasing soon?
Not much.

The 821 is expected to be a 14nm chip, with four of Qualcomm’s Kryo CPU cores and Adreno 530 graphics — as is the 820. But, while the Snapdragon 820 has a top speed of 2.2 GHz, the Snapdragon 821 is said to max out at 2.3- 2.4 GHz.

Building on the technology leadership introduced with the Snapdragon 820 platform, the 821 is engineered to deliver faster speed, improved power savings, and greater application performance. Clearly all this is done with a view to ensuring that the 821 powered devices keep pace with the growing performance demands of users and deliver the unmatched user experiences the Snapdragon 800 tier has come to be known for.

The Snapdragon 821 is also reported to have been engineered to deliver a 10% performance increase over the 820 with the Qualcomm Kryo quad-core CPU.

So now for the tough question — Why would Qualcomm introduce something to replace what many consider the best mobile processor available today? Simple, they would not.

Rather than replace the Snapdragon 820, the 821 is designed to complement and extend the competitive strengths of the Snapdragon 800 line-up.

The Snapdragon 820 currently powers some of the most advanced, feature rich smartphones today, including the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, Xiaomi Mi 5, LG G5, HTC 10, LeEco Le Max Pro and Le Max 2, and Sony Xperia X Performance.

The world agrees that the Snapdragon 820 helped improve the user experience for mobile imaging, virtual reality, battery life, and connectivity speed and reliability; and the updates included in Snapdragon 821 will help keep devices powered by Snapdragon 800 premium-tier processors at the top of people’s shopping lists into the foreseeable future.

If Asus’ press materials are correct, it is likely to be assumed that the Zenfone 3 Deluxe could be one of the first phones with the new chip, but we doubt it will be the last. Chinese phone maker Le Eco is expected to launch a smartphone with a Snapdragon 821 processor as well.

The Snapdragon 821 (or 823, if that is what it ends up being called), will likely be to Qualcomm’s flagship processor until the Snapdragon 830 is ready to be unveiled, probably in 2017.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.