When you think of the internals powering up a smartphone, tablet or even a smartwatch running the Android operating system, chances are that there’s a Qualcomm SoC in there. The reason is that the company makes a variety of processors for any specific needs those devices might have. Their Snapdragon lineup includes the 200 series featuring quad-core processing for basic devices that don’t require too much in the graphics department, some of them even include an LTE modem. The 400 series is more popular with mid-range devices, some of those processors are octa-core and include 64-bit architecture. The 600 series is less popular, but it includes many capabilities that some high-end models require, such as support for QHD displays and the latest Adreno GPU. Finally, there’s the flagship 800 series, some models feature the most advanced X10 LTE modems, support for displays with 4K resolution and very high-resolution camera sensors.
Qualcomm kind of spoiled its reputation as their current greatest high-end offering, the Snapdragon 810, is supposed to be extremely capable in theory, but its performance didn’t quite meet the expectations. Not only that, but there have been some reported issues about the way this processor handles its temperature when some intensive apps are being used. This might have prevented some companies like Samsung or LG to use this processor in their latest flagship offerings while others trusted in software optimization to prevent it from overheating.
There have been some rumors that Samsung is already working with Qualcomm so that the Snapdragon 820 could be included in some variants of their next flagship. We still don’t know much about that processor, only a few details, but apparently, many companies are interested in including it in their newest offerings. The president of Qualcomm from China, Frank Meng, mentioned that there are currently 30 smartphones in development with a variety of designs that will use this particular processor. He didn’t go into any specifics, but we could assume that many of the OEMs that have included one of the processors from the Snapdragon 800 series would be the ones that use it in their new flagship devices. Supposedly, Qualcomm would send the OEMs a revised version known as V3.X in October for testing purposes, so we might have more details about those devices and their performance around that date.