Qualcomm are the mainstay of Android processors and at the end of each year they announce their upcoming year’s flagship processor. This year they were expected to announce the Snapdragon 855 (following on from the SD835 and the SD845) but they appear to have changed the naming format this year.
The new flagship chip for Qualcomm has passed through the Bluetooth SIG certified with Bluetooth 5.0 LE. The page at Bluetooth SIG also specifies that the chipset will also support WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 2×2 MIMO. According to MySmartPrice the design name is WCN3998-0 which refers to the chip announced in February of this year and offers up to 67% reduced power consumption.
The Snapdragon 8150 chipset will be manufactured using a 7nm process and will most likely be paired with the Snapdragon X50 5G modem, after all we are expecting 5G handsets to arrive in force next year. The new 7nm manufacturing process will bring the Snapdragon 8150 up to the levels of the Huawei Kirin 980 and the Apple A12 Bionic according to leaked benchmarks. All of these are based on leaks and there is nothing official yet from Qualcomm so use a small grain of salt — we feel quite strongly that these leaks are legitimate.
What more chipsets can do I have no idea but who doesn’t want their smartphone to draw less power while doing more things? Hopefully the Snapdragon 8150 lives up to expectations and can match the other processors on the block because it will no doubt be in a large amount of Android devices come 2019.
