14 DAY TRIAL // It hasn’t been a great year for US chip giant Qualcomm. The company has been feeling major pressures from the competition, especially from low-cost silicon producers like MediaTek, who are gaining more and more attention.
But Qualcomm’s biggest problem in 2015 remains the Snapdragon 810. Sadly, the SoC might go down in history as the company’s most notable flop, one which marked the descent of the company. You might have heard that Qualcomm is currently considering splitting up into several smaller units and is planning to lay off a lot of employees too.
Anyway, at MWC 2015, the chip maker announced it was working on its next-gen chip design, the Snapdragon 820, the first one to be based on its own custom designed cores dubbed Kyro.
So basically, the Snapdragon 820 is going to be inherently different from the Snapdragon 810 which relies on custom ARM cores instead.
But even knowing this, rumors that the Snapdragon 820 platform will be suffering from the same overheating issues have surfaced online recently. However, as we told you back then, there’s a slim chance of them actually having any substance.
The Snapdragon 820 is an entirely different thing
Still, if you needed more reassurance, this week, research director for IHS Technology China Kevin Wang said in a Weibo post that device manufacturers should take notice of Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 820 because the chip does not suffer from the same troubles as its predecessor (as seen at Gizmo China).
The analyst credits the quartet of custom cores as well as the 14nm process used for the temperature stabilization on the Snapdragon 820.
Qualcomm is expected to start shipping out the new chipset before December this year and we’re told that the Xiaomi Mi5 will be the first device to actually take advantage of the platform. We expect the device to launch in March of next year.
We’ve also heard that the Snapdragon 820 will be powering the ASUS PadFone S2, which is also tipped to make it out into the wild in March.
Apart from that, Sony and HTC are also expected to launch products bundling Qualcomm’s next-gen top-tier chipset. Even Samsung might make a comeback to Qualcomm next year, rumors say.