Published in Mobiles

2017 Snapdragon will be 10nm

by on14 April 2016


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Launched by the year's end

There has been a leak about the Snapdragon 823, or a successor to Snapdragon 820, which will be more than just a faster version –  our well-placed industry sources have confirmed that Qualcomm plans to use the 10nm process on the new chip late in 2016.

Despite a potential announcement in 2016, the next generation Snapdragon will not be seen in phones until Q1 2017 and will probably find its place in top-end devices. Nothing is set in stone, but one can imagine that future Samsung, LG, HTC and many other major players will end up using the Snapdragon 8x0 10 nanometer chip. We heard the name Snapdragon 830 mentioned in some of our conversations. Fudzilla is not the first to talk about a 10nm Snapdragon 820 successor, but we have managed to confirm the existence of Snapdragon in 10nm from our independent sources.

The Snapdragon 823, which is a faster version of the 820,  might end up in Samsung Galaxy Note 6 and the future Sony Xperia and G Flex 3. The latest leak calls this chip a SM8996PRO with a 64 Bit Kryo Quad core at 2.6GHz and an Adreno at 720MHz. This is quite a boost from the  Snapdragon 820's top speed of 2.2 GHz for the CPU and 624MHz for the Adreno 530. Some sources mention a 3GHz core clock, but that sounds a bit too optimistic.

Both TSMC and Samsung should be ready for volume production of 10nm.  This is a process that will help mobile SoC manufacturers put a little distance between the 2015 and 2016 SoCs and the ones that they plan to ship in 2017.

This might be the first Snapdragon using ARM Cortex cores but we don’t have enough information to make that claim. At some point Qualcomm was considering abandoning the development of the custom in house ARM cores for mobile, but the success of Snapdragon 820 might have changed people's minds. We do know it is 10nm and that it should be shipping roughly 11 months from now.

Last modified on 27 July 2016
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