Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 Launched; Claimed to Be 10 Percent Faster Than Snapdragon 820

Qualcomm on Monday announced the successor to its Snapdragon 820 flagship mobile processor, called the Snapdragon 821. According to the chipmaker, the all-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 comes with improved speed, power savings, and greater application performance than its predecessor.

The company claims that the Snapdragon 821 is "engineered" to deliver a 10 percent general performance increase over the Snapdragon 820. Notably, the Snapdragon 821 SoC also packs the Kryo quad-core CPU with clock speeds of up to 2.4GHz. AnandTech points that the new premium chipset from Qualcomm will come with MSM8996 Pro naming.

The chipmaker expects that commercial devices powered by the Snapdragon 821 SoC will be available to consumers in the second half of 2016. Qualcomm promises that more information on the Snapdragon 821 will be revealed soon.

The company adds that the new Snapdragon 821 SoC retains most of the the Snapdragon 820's features such as supporting download speeds of up to 600Mbps, LTE uploads up to 3x as fast with Snapdragon Upload, apart from improved call quality and reliability with Ultra HD Voice.

Some of the Snapdragon 820-powered smartphones launched so far in 2016 are the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, Xiaomi Mi 5, LG G5, HTC 10, LeEco Le Max 2, and Sony Xperia X Performance.

Apart from the regular smartphones and tablets, the new Snapdragon 821 will also support upcoming technologies such as mobile VR head mounted displays.

"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," Qualcomm writes.