We’ve been looking forward to seeing Qualcomm’s new, powerful Snapdragon 810 mobile processor for quite a while now. We saw it feature in a few new smartphones at CES this year, but the company’s own financials tell us that it won’t appear in a certain large customer’s best and most high profile Android phone this year.
Computer chip image via Shutterstock
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 chip makes a lot of things possible on future smartphones — 4K displays, 4K video recording and streaming at high bit-rates, significant improvements in audio processing — but the chipmaker itself says in its Q1 earnings report that chip almost certainly “will not be in the upcoming design cycle of a large customer’s flagship device”.
Precisely who that customer is is not explicitly stated, but looking back at the last two years’ major handset releases it would almost certainly be Samsung — the highest profile and largest volume user of the Snapdragon 800 and 801 in the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5. The S6 should feature the Snapdragon 810 as the latest and greatest mobile processor available, but it’s looking like that may not be the case.
The rumour mills on the internet generally include a Snapdragon 810 on the specs sheets of 2015’s top Android handsets — the HTC One M9, Sony Xperia Z4, LG’s future G4, the aforementioned Galaxy S6 — almost as a matter of course. Whether those claims are driven by cold hard proof or by wild speculation seems to vary, but this recent statement by Qualcomm does suggest that you should take said rumours with a large grain of salt.
However, LG’s G Flex 2 announced at CES 2015 features a Snapdragon 810, so it seems like the chipset is at least somewhat ready for prime-time, but Qualcomm is also apparently facing overheating issues with the processor that will either delay or entirely preclude its inclusion in flagship Android handsets like the future Samsung Galaxy S6 and LG G4.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The lesser Snapdragon 805 made its Australian debut late last year in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, is one of the most powerful mobile chipsets ever released, and uses Qualcomm’s mobile modem expertise to support the latest high speed mobile data networking standards from all three of Australia’s biggest telcos in Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. [Qualcomm]