Right now, the hot Qualcomm SoC everyone seems to be talking about is the Snapdragon 810: which phones will get the 810 first, and what do all those rumors of production issues mean for availability? And while the 810’s top-shelf performance means that we’ll be paying attention to it for some time to come, it’s still a chip that was announced coming up on a year ago; when will the 810 find itself overshadowed by something new? While the “when” of that remains to be seen, a new leak attempts to help us out with the “what” a little bit, laying out Qualcomm’s plans for its next generation of mobile processors.
The document describes two new 8-series chips, the Snapdragon 820 and 815, as well as four 6-series entries, the Snapdragon 616, 620, 625, and 629.
Major advancements in these chips include the move to support for higher-speed LPDDR4 RAM in the 625, 629, 815, and 820, compatibility with LTE Cat 10 networks thanks to the modems in many of these models, the introduction of new custom core designs, and the transition to more advanced fabrication techniques.
Those new cores are part of the Taipan family, the 64-bit successor to Qualcomm’s Krait. Individually, we see mention of TS1, TS1i, and TS2 cores. As for the fabrication, Qualcomm could start moving to a 20nm process for the 625, 629, and 815, as well as an advanced 14nm FinFet process for the flagship 820. And of course, look for next-gen Adreno SoCs in all these models.
Knowing Qualcomm, it could be some time before we actually see these chips start ending up in mobile hardware (and that’s even after they’re formally announced), but at least we have a lot to look forward to.
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