Qualcomm is waving goodbye to the Snapdragon 810 as its flagship and has today launched the Snapdragon 820, a new flagship chipset. Needless to say, the curtain being raised on Qualcomm’s new silicon has wide implications for the rest of the smartphone market as many of the next generation of top line handsets will be carrying this processor.

Xiaomi has confirmed in no uncertain terms that it is holding off launching its Mi 5 flagship smartphone until the Snapdragon 820 lands. Indeed, now the 820 is out expect the Chinese company to launch its flagship within a month, while the likes of Sony, HTC, LG, and even Samsung are likely to showcases devices with the 820 on board over the next three to six months.

After dominating the processor industry for years, Qualcomm faced a tough 2015 as the Snapdragon 810 became mired in problems. Namely, it run too hot and created poor performance as devices struggled to cool off; Qualcomm long said the issue was fixed, but there were reports consistently that the 810 was a troublemaker. So much so that Samsung ignored Qualcomm entirely for the Galaxy S6 range and Galaxy Note 5, favoring its own Exynos 7420 instead.

Sammy was not the only company worried about the Snapdragon 810, LG and Motorola both opted for the lesser Snapdragon 808 for their 2015 flagships, and Xiaomi has been holding out for the Snapdragon 820 for a reason.

So, the new chipset has a lot of wrong’s to right and on paper at least it seems to be up to the task, with Qualcomm adamant there are no overheating issues here. The Snapdragon 820 comes with support for Quick Charge 3.0, which is 38% faster than Quick Charge 2.0 and four times faster than normal charging. The new Adreno 530 GPU promises photo realistic graphics, while Wi-Fi 802.11ad and 802.11ac 2x2 MU-MIMO support means ultra-fast Wi-Fi should be attainable.

On top of this, the Snapdragon 820 is the first processor to ship with LTE-U support, from Qualcomm or anyone else. The 64-bit quad-core CPU uses Qualcomm's own Kryo cores (running as fast as 2.2GHz) and is capable of supporting cameras up to 28 megapixels and for 4K ultra HD playback and recording.

SOURCE: MobileBurn