Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 821 processor

The chip maker Qualcomm has announced the next processor in the Snapdragon 800 tier, called Snapdragon 821. The company says that the chip will begin shipping inside commercial devices in the second half of 2016 and will be better able to handle new mobile VR/AR apps among other tasks.

Qualcomm, in its announcement, writes:

“Building on the technology leadership introduced with the Snapdragon 820 platform, the 821 is engineered to deliver faster speed, improved power savings, and greater application performance, ensuring 821 powered devices keep pace with the growing performance demands of users to deliver the unmatched user experiences the Snapdragon 800 tier is known for.”

In terms of hard number, the Snapdragon 821 brings a 10% performance increase over the 820 with a Qualcomm Kryo quad-core CPU which can reach speeds of 2.4GHz. The new chip only brings slight improvements over the 820 processor meaning the current flagship devices such as the Xiaomi Mi 5 and HTC 10 won't feel outdated when the Snapdragon 821 hits the market.

Qualcomm says that the 821 processor builds on the success of the Snapdragon 820 platform to “keep pace with the growing performance demands of users to deliver unmatched users experience”. The chip-maker does stress, however, that it is not designed to replace the 820, but complement it “and extend the competitive strengths” of the Snapdragon 800 line-up.

Source: Qualcomm