One of the design wins that got leaked a few weeks back is the LeEco LeMax 2 Pro with 8GB or RAM but we suspect that Qualcomm wanted to prepare this chip for the Samsung Galaxy Note S7, the biggest design win to come in the Android space.

Since the Snapdragon 820 with Kryo core clocked at 2.15GHz has been selling for two quarters, the company managed to do additional optimization and increased the clock by an impressive 250MHz getting it to a final 2.4Ghz. This is again a maximal processor clock and as you know this maximal clock will only occur occasionally when the SoC needs a lot of power. We can think of two possible scenarios where you will be able to max the Snapdragon 821, launching the application and some of the games.

Qualcomm has managed to get to 115 design wins with Snapdragon 820, but again since the Snapdragon 820 got so  successful, some important clients wanted to get something a bit faster. The company claims a 10 percent performance increase in performance.  

It is clear that Snapdragon 821 will not replace the Snapdragon 820. They will both co-exist as many vendors will not want to pay the premium.

The rest of the device including DSP, Snapdragon X12 LTE modem remain unchanged and we are waiting to hear back about the possible change of the maximal GPU clock. Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 is inside of the Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge, Xiaomi Mi5, LG G5, HTC 10, LeEco LeMax 2 and Sony Xperia X and at least 108 other less prominent phones.

Snapdragon 821 is expected in phones in the second half of 2016 and it won’t be reserved for smartphones only. You can expect to see Snapdragon 821 based tablets, mobile VR head mounted displays and other new devices. The last Galaxy Note 5 was launched in the middle of August, and that gives us the idea that the Galaxy Note 7 might not be far off either.

We can guess that IFA, that starts in the first days of September in Berlin German will be an interesting place and time for some additional Snapdragon 821 devices too.