Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs are quite probably the most popular mobile processors in the world. This US-based company has been manufacturing great chips for years now, but their latest Snapdragon 810 offering wasn’t exactly what everyone expected. Not long after it was released, reports started coming in saying that it runs too hot, and the word ‘overheats’ was mentioned quite frequently actually. Qualcomm has denied the rumors for a long time, and then NTT DoCoMo (Japanese carrier) basically confirmed it. There are quite a few Snapdragon 810-powered smartphones available out in the market, and some of them seem to heat a bit too much, though Qualcomm made some changes and released the second version of the chip which should fare better.
That being said, Qualcomm has been working on the new Snapdragon 820 SoC for quite some time now, and it looks like it might ship to OEMs soon enough. According to a recent report, the first batch of Qualcomm’s new processors will ship to OEMs like Sony, Xiaomi and HTC really soon. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 SoC will actually be manufactured on a 14nm process (much like Samsung’s Exynos 7420 SoC), and it seems that will resolve all of Qualcomm’s reported heating issues. This chip will feature Qualcomm’s 64 Kyro architecture, which runs at 3GHz and is reportedly far more powerful than any other Snapdragon offering out in the market.
These chips will start shipping soon, but don’t expect Snapdragon 820-powered handsets to arrive before the very end of this year, perhaps even Q1 2016. It will be interesting to see if companies like Xiaomi can actually implement this SoC in their handsets soon enough to release it in Q4 2015, because Xiaomi’s upcoming flagship is rumored to sport this chip. Xiaomi is, of course, not the only company that is rumored to have such plans, but we’ll see what will happen before the end of this year. The 14nm Exynos 7420 fuels Samsung’s current Galaxy S6 flagships and is quite a powerful SoC, so you can expect the Snapdragon 820 to be a true flagship offering by Qualcomm, and the heat issues should be long gone by the time this thing hits the market.