Qualcomm has not exactly had the best year throughout 2015. Samsung decided to go it alone with the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, and look set to do so again with the Galaxy Note 5, and the Snapdragon 810 has been plagued by heating issues in the press. Their recent Q2 2015 results were some of the worst in the company’s history and as a result they’re having to cut thousands of jobs and perhaps rethink their entire business model. The Snapdragon 820 seems to be the company’s savior at this point, and rumors have been swirling that some sort of announcement was going to be held later this month come August 11th, although according to other reports, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Despite Qualcomm themselves refusing to comment either way on these rumors to us, it looks like others have figured it out. The confusion seems to have stemmed from the upcoming SIGGRAPH event, held every year in the US. SIGGRAPH stands for “Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques” and is an event during which industry giants display upcoming technologies and such where graphics processing is concerned, among other things. Qualcomm have apparently been sending out invites to this event, which is where the confusion started, as members of the press thought that this event was where Qualcomm would introduce the new Snapdragon 820. For what it’s worth, we did not receive an invite to SIGGRAPH from Qualcomm. The entire SIGGRAPH event will run from August 9th until August 13th, and will be hosted in Los Angeles.
Now that the dates add up, it’s easy to see where this rumour first came from. In hindsight, an August launch for the Snapdragon 820 would seem a little early, even if Qualcomm were to make it clear that devices wouldn’t started shipping until late Fall. Either way, it looks as though we’ll have to keep on waiting to see what Qualcomm have in store for us next. With custom cores and a new GPU, there’s a lot of excitement surrounding the Snapdragon 820, so we hope to see more on it soon.