Earlier today, Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 820. We’ve been hearing about it for months now, much of the tidbits coming from Qualcomm themselves, and today was its big unveiling. Well, we say unveiling, commercial smartphones and other devices won’t hit shelves with the new processor until early next year, Qualcomm is today saying “first half” of next year. The new Snapdragon 820 aims to undo the misstep that was the Snapdragon 810, with a return to custom CPU cores, a new GPU and even faster LTE speeds. To mark the unveiling of their new chip, the Qualcomm’s VP of Product Marketing, Tim McDonough has been answering questions from all over the web and one or two of them caught our eye.
Of course the Snapdragon 820 will be making its way into Android smartphones next year, and likely some Android tablets as well, but someone wanted to know where else the processor would end up, and McDonough had an interesting answer. Asked whether it would make it to other devices, he simply responded that “You’ll see #Snapdragon820 in phones, tablets, and all kinds of devices—like cameras, cars, VR, and even drones.” Now, this could be a fairly standard answer from a company like Qualcomm, after all they don’t really care where it ends up outside of phones, as long as they can sell the amount of volume to make some money. Interestingly though, cameras, VR and drone applications seem like new ones to us. After all, how many Drones do we know of that would require as much processing power as the Snapdragon 820 can afford?
The Snapdragon 820 represents a big improvement over the Snapdragon 810, and we’re sure that Qualcomm want their new processor to be successful, no matter where it ends up. McDonough himself has said that they have “60 device wins” already lined up for the Snapdragon 820, and we’re sure that number is only likely to grow as new partners come on board and shore up their orders. Processors can often be boring talk, but the Snapdragon 820 looks set to empower next year’s Android devices – and potentially drones! – like never before, and we can’t wait.