It’s the tail end of the year which means we’re past seeing much by way of new phones, and we shift towards looking at what might come next year.

Qualcomm follows an annual release cycle for its premium smartphone chipsets, and the successor to the current-model Sapdragon 855+ is shaiping up as the Snapdragon 865.

According to a reliable Chinese tipster, GSMArena reports that the specifications we’re likely to see include:

  • 1 x ARM A77 core at 2.84 GHz
  • 3 x ARM A77 cores at 2.42 GHz
  • 4 x ARM A55 cores at 1.8 GHz
  • Adreno 650 GPU at 587 MHz

Qualcomm has already announced it will be holding its annual tech summit in early December, and the Snapdragon 865 is likely to be shown off here.

For those who enjoy a technical detail or two, the new chipset is believed to be built on Samsung’s latest 7nm EUV process, and will offer 4G and 4G/5G variants for customers’ varied needs.

What does all this mean? We should see a chipset that’s up to 20% faster than the existing Snapdragon 855+ processor, and the new Adreno 650 GPU should offer a similar graphics performance improvement.

Looking at who releases what at which time of year, we can probably expect to see this new chipset in phones from Sony, Samsung and Xiaomi (and perhaps LG) in the next couple of months.