Six months after the first Snapdragon 820 devices made their debut, Qualcomm is announcing the Snapdragon 821 SoC with a 10% performance gain. The Snapdragon 821 will retain a quad-core Kryo CPU cluster, but will offer faster cores clocked at 2.4GHz (the 820 maxed out at 2.15GHz). The first batch of devices powered by the Snapdragon 821 will be launching in the second half of the year, lining up nicely with the expected debut of the Galaxy Note 7.
In a blog post, Qualcomm mentioned that the Snapdragon 821 will "complement" its high-end SoC lineup:
Rather than replace the Snapdragon 820, the 821 is designed to complement and extend the competitive strengths of our Snapdragon 800 lineup.Because the Snapdragon 820 helped improve the user experience for mobile imaging, virtual reality, battery life, and connectivity speed and reliability, all the updates we've included in Snapdragon 821 will help keep devices powered by Snapdragon 800 premium-tier processors at the top of people's shopping lists into the foreseeable future.
We'll have more to share about the Snapdragon 821 in the coming months.
