14 DAY TRIAL // Qualcomm had a pretty rough 2015, as the chipmaker's top-of-the-line processor, the Snapdragon 810, was affected by overheating issues that were denied by the company many times throughout the year.
Several major handset makers decided to include a slightly lower Qualcomm chipset inside their flagships (Snapdragon 808) and risk not being able to compete with other smartphones in the same price range that were equipped with more powerful chipsets rather than face the customers' wrath.
Other companies, like Xiaomi, may have decided to delay their flagship for several months until Qualcomm launched another high-end chipset.
After Qualcomm announced their new Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor, many have feared that the SoC (system-on-chip) would face the same issues as its predecessor.
Preliminary benchmarks show Snapdragon 820 beats competition
However, these rumors are not yet confirmed, and the preliminary benchmarks show Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 is quite a beast capable of beating Samsung's Exynos 8890, but also Huawei's Kirin 950.
There's a high chance that more than 75 percent of the flagship smartphones launched this year will come equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor inside, and that should be a good thing, considering its benchmark scores.
Qualcomm was highly praised at MWC 2016, as many companies decided to make the Snapdragon 820 the “piece de resistance” of their flagship smartphones.
It shows that Qualcomm managed to regain its lost credibility, as all handset makers now want the Snapdragon 820 CPU inside their products.
But the big winner isn't really Qualcomm since the Snapdragon 820 chipset will be entirely manufactured by Samsung. The South Korean company announced last month that Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 would be built using 14nm LPP (low-Power Plus) process, the 2nd generation of its own 14nm FinFET process technology.
Although it's the same technology used to manufacture the Exynos 8890 chipset, the Snapdragon 820 is more popular among handset makers, and some would say it’s for the right reason: it offers better performance and less power consumption.