Alleged Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Details Leak For 2020 Flagship Phones

Right now the chipset that reins sumpreme in the high-end flagship smartphone performance department is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 SoC. Despite that chip still being quite new, there are already rumors of a next-gen chip coming that will bring even more performance to the table of course, as well as additional Qualcomm-powered 5G capabilities. We have reported on the existing of the rumored Snapdragon 865 before, but today some new rumors have just turned up.

The new rumors come from Roland Quandt over at Winfuture. He claims that Snapdragon 865 is what Qualcomm employees are calling the next-gen SoC (SM8250). Quandt claims that there are two versions of the new SoC with one going by the code name Kona (past rumors tipped Kora as a code name, but this makes more sense for QCOM's love of all things Hawaii), while the other version is tipped as Huracan. Speculation suggests that one of those chipsets will have an integrated 5G modem and the other won't. It's unclear which version would have the 5G modem integrated.

Snapdragon 865 is what Qualcomm employees call the next gen high-end SoC (SM8250). There are two variants: Kona + Huracan. Both with support for LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 3.0. One likely with, one without integrated 5G modem (SDX55) - I guess. Also no clue which is the one w/ 5G in it.

— Roland Quandt (@rquandt) June 14, 2019

Past rumors tipped that the Snapdragon 865 development boards that had been seen were accompanied by another chip called the SDM55 presumed to be a reference to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G modem. That would seemingly indicate that Qualcomm has been unable to integrate the 5G modem and the 865 onto one chip. The Snapdragon 855 is paired up with the Snapdragon X50 5G modem for first-gen 5G smartphones.

Other rumors suggest the Snapdragon 865 SoC would support LPDDR5X system RAM, while the current gen Snapdragon 855 supports LPDDR4X memory. If the rumor is true, that will mean a lot more memory bandwidth than the current SoC. There is no indication of when the Snapdragon 865 might launch, but if Qualcomm follows its past schedule, we would expect the 865 to be announced late this year with devices landing in Q1 2020 powered by the Snapdragon 865. Rumors also suggest that Samsung will again manufacture the Snapdragon 865 for Qualcomm on its 7nm process node.