Qualcomm recently announced the Snapdragon 820 here in the US, and it’ll be powering a number of high-end smartphones in 2016 – rumors are suggesting that the Galaxy S7 will be one of them – and now it appears that Qualcomm will be holding a special event in China to announce the Snapdragon 820 to the Chinese market. According to a graphic that has been made available, the event will be on December 11th at 1pm local time.
Now the Snapdragon 820 was announced last month, so there likely won’t be much new announced at this event. The Snapdragon 820 is a quad-core CPU (seems Qualcomm is dropping the octa-core for now) and it is a 64-bit chip. Each of the cores are clocked at 2.2GHz, it also features LTE Cat 12 and 13, which can bring users download speeds of around 600Mbps. Powering the graphics inside the Snapdragon 820 this time around is the Adreno 530 GPU.
In recent years, Qualcomm has had problems in the Chinese market. With much more competition in China, and the Chinese wanting cheaper and cheaper phones (something manufacturers can’t do as well with Qualcomm chipsets), not to mention, getting hit with lawsuits recently. Qualcomm is looking to start fresh. Xiaomi, who is a start up that was established in 2010, is Qualcomm’s third largest customer, and has a pretty large impact on the Chinese market and Indian market. Both of which are huge markets in itself. Qualcomm is looking to win over some other customers in China specifically, and win some customers away from MediaTek and even Exynos. Huawei, mostly sticks to using their own processors, although they don’t sell them to other companies, surprisingly.
The Xiaomi Mi5 is expected to have the Snapdragon 820, along with about 60 other devices, according to Qualcomm’s Tim McDonough. Many of which we’ll see between now and the end of March at CES and Mobile World Congress. Many are skeptical of the Snapdragon 820 after the overheating issues caused by the Snapdragon 810. But we’ll have to wait and see once we get a device that has the new Snapdragon 820 inside and see how well it performs. However, Qualcomm has assured us that it stays nice and cool.