Snapdragon 821 SoC gives upcoming flagship phones a boost

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 SoC powers pretty much every recent high-end phone that's not branded with an Apple logo. Qualcomm wants to hang onto that dominance with a minor mid-cycle update called the Snapdragon 821. This SoC promises a clock speed increase of 10% over its predecessor, a boost that the company says is good for clock speeds up to 2.4GHz. Qualcomm also promises lower power consumption from the new chip.

We haven't had the opportunity to perform a Snapdragon 820 deep-dive, but Anandtech has . The Snapdragon 820 is made up of four Qualcomm Kryo custom CPU cores . One pair of those cores runs at 2.2GHz, while the other, more power-sipping set runs at 1.6GHz. The chip also includes an Adreno 530 GPU , ...