Qualcomm's Next-Gen Snapdragon 865 Smartphone SoC Launching In December

It's reported that the Snapdragon 865 will be manufactured on Samsung's 7nm EUV process, which should provide some nice efficiency gains over the current Snapdragon 855 family. Qualcomm also has stated in the past that it would make available two version of its flagship SoC. The "cheaper" option would only include integrated 4G LTE connectivity. However, a “premium” SKU of the Snapdragon 865 is said to incorporate an integrated 5G modem. At this point, we don't know if this will be a design based on the Snapdragon X55 or some other variant.

While the Snapdragon 855 can make use of LPDDR4X for system memory, the Snapdragon 865 is rumored to be compatible with faster and more power efficient LPDDR5 memory. We're likely to see some pretty significant memory bandwidth advantages over the Snapdragon 855 with this update. Previous leaked benchmarks have shown the Snapdragon 865 making some sizable gains in the single-threaded score and even bigger games in multi-threaded performance.

What else can we expect to see at this year's Snapdragon Tech Summit? It's likely that we could see a follow-up to both the standalone Snapdragon X55 5G modem and the PC-centric Snapdragon 8cx. It'd also be nice if we could see a true next-generation version of the Snapdragon Wear Platform instead of the warm refreshes that we've seen over the years.

We're also certain that more information will leak regarding Qualcomm's upcoming products over the coming weeks, and will keep you abreast of all the later happenings as we hear about them.