The next Snapdragon that is expected to be showcased this year and start shipping in early 2018 is still a 10nm LPE SoC. This makes perfect sense, as there won’t be a more advanced process than that. The leak, of course, originated in China's Mydriver website, so no surprise there.
The leak implies that Snapdragon 845 uses a combination of a yet to be announced Cortex A75 cores and a power aware cluster with four Cortex A53. We would suggest that Qualcomm plans to modify Cortex A75 architecture in order to be able to call it Kryo, but we might be wrong about that. The Cortex A75 is likely going to be optimised for more performance with lower power consumption, that is likely to be the main design direction.
As far as we know, Snapdragon 835 has a cluster with Cortex A53 that is still gets to call Kryo 280.
The company plans to use a next generation graphics called Adreno 630 - an obvious step forward and, of course, you can expect the performance will be increased, compared to the Snapdragon 835.
The new SoC comes with a new modem called the Snapdragon X20. The modem supports 5x20 MHz channels, 256 QAM modulation as well as 1.2Gbps LTE. This has a chance be the fastest integrated modem solution once it launches.
When it comes to Wi-Fi, the new SoC supports 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and ad. This is a commitment that Qualcomm started with the Snapdragon 820 and it doesn’t plan to change that. Qualcomm will end up winning a lot of Wi-Fi related benchmarks with its implementation, Fudzilla reckons. The new chipset supports UFS 2.1, 4x16 Bit LPDDR4X.
This SoC will most likely end up in most high-end Android phones that are scheduled to appear after March 2018 or, should we say, the Mobile World Congress?
The same leak implies that the Kirin 970 might launch in a Q3 / Q4 2017 timeframe. Kirin is the heart of Huawei's high end "solutions" and will come with an obvious Cortex A73 with quad Cortex A53, the same approach that MediaTek is using for its Helio X30.
The chipset uses a 5x20 MHz 256 QAM 1.2Gbps capable modem. If it launches in late 2017, it might even get to the market before Qualcomm. The Kirin 970 is an obvious choice for a Mate 9 big screen phablet phone that usually launches in September / October.
The SoC packs 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and no end of Wi-Gig present in the SoC. It also supports both UFS 2.1 and MMC as well as 4x16bit LPDDR4X. You can expect to see this one in late Q3 or early Q4 2017.
MediaTek should have its Helio X30 in the market by early Q3 with a similar core combination and so to speak, a 10nm FinFET powering a few loyal brands in China.
