Back in December, Cristiano Amon, the president of Qualcomm, confirmed to us that there will be some Snapdragon 845 devices coming later in 2018.
Our talkative industry sources are confirming that the Snapdragon 845 based devices are heavily in the works and that there might be a few other partners jumping on the ARM based bandwagon.
The devices are expected to ship in the second half of 2018, probably making them ready for the holiday season of 2018. To try to be more precise, we would expect to see partner announcements between September, last month of Q3 and October, the first month of Q4. This is, of course, a rough plan and it will be decided by the partners.
Clear future roadmap going forward
Qualcomm might even change the branding between the Snapdragon for PC and the Snapdragon for mobile devices as essentially the notebook chips can operate at much higher TDPs compared to the phones.
We were told by Qualcomm that the Snapdragon 845 will enable a much easier design cycle compared to the first generation of Snapdragon based Windows 10 devices. A partner can take a phone PCB design and adjust it to make a PC. This will dramatically reduce the R&D cost for OEMs and partners. This might be the tipping point to evoke more interest from partners.
Fudzilla heard that Samsung and Xiaomi were interested in the second generation of Snapdragon devices, but this is something that may be announced at a later date, closer to the holiday season launch.