When Qualcomm first released the Sanpdragon 820, it was considered a much better prcoessor than its predecessor, the 810. The Snapdragon 810 had 8 cores, yet it had heating issues, which meant not many flagships or tablets contained this processor. The issue had meant that the performance of your device would be affected. Soon after, the 820 was much improved and fixed all these issues, whilst being much more powerful. Now, Qualcomm have announced that they are going to be releasing their new processor, the Snapdragon 821, a much improved processor. It performs 10% more than its current processor, which is used in various flagships such as the Samsung Galaxy S7/Edge, LG G5, HTC 10 and OnePlus 3.
The Sanpdragon 821 builds on the 820, improving the technologies, which is what Qualcomm say led to its success. With the technology, Qualcomm is looking to improve the speed of the processors, to provide performance that has never been seen before. Qualcomm say that the 821 has reached up to 2.4GHz from 2.1GHz for the same quad core used, improving the speeds from the 820. This is because Qualcomm are not looking to replace the 820, probably until Q1 or Q2 of next year, for the flagships of next year, but could instead be for phones releasing in Q3 or Q4 such as the new Galaxy Note, or new Nexus phone.
The Snapdragon 820 had introduced a variety of things that Qualcomm believed to improve the user experience. Examples of this is that the download speeds can support up to 600mbps, faster LTE uploads, and improved call quality for users. The technology used in the 821 is borrowed from the 821, so most of the things you find are the same.
“We’re excited to tell you more about just how the Snapdragon 821 will help set a new bar for smartphones, tablets, mobile VR head mounted displays and other new devices. You can expect commercial devices powered by the 821 in the second half of 2016.”
– Qualcomm
From this, we can see that there will definitely be devices using this processor soon, and as said before, it could be use in the higher-end Nexus device, the new Galaxy Note or even the ZenFone 3. But something to take in from what Qualcomm say is that it could be used in VR headsets, and so any new headsets expected this year may use this processor, showing how powerful it is and how the technology implicated is what they believe to be amazing. The processor may feature a new GPU, but this is unknown. We can expect more news soon of this processor once officially released, and see how it actually performs when it is implemented.
