Qualcomm slated to release new Snapdragon 845 in December, Samsung Galaxy S9 with first claim

Qualcomm announced the release of the Snapdragon 835—its premium SoC that has gone on to power most of the notable flagships released this year—in January at CES 2017. New information, however, indicates that the manufacturers are set to launch the successor to the 835, the Snapdragon 845, a month earlier this time around, in December.

Qualcomm succeeded the Snapdragon 820 with the Snapdragon 821 last year, with the latter offering slight improvements in the raw performance and graphics departments, due to overclocked cores and GPUs. There was information pointing towards a new Snapdragon 836 that would mirror the relationship between the 820 and 821, and also feature on the Pixel 2 devices. All of that was for nothing, though, as Qualcomm refuted claims of plans for a Snapdragon 836, leaving Q4 flagships like the Pixels and the upcoming HTC U11 Plus with no option than to use the Snapdragon 835. 

The 845 will be the natural successor to the 835, and while we don't know a lot about the next-gen SoC, word on the grapevine says it will be built on the same 10nm manufacturing process as the Snapdragon 835, which leaves raw performance as the only other major room for improvement—a department Qualcomm will have to take seriously if the SoC is to catch up to Apple's new A11 processors.

Rumors say that Samsung has Samsung has laid claims to the first production batch of the Snapdragon 845—just like with the 835, which means that even if Qualcomm launches the SoC in December, we won't get real-life usage of the chipset till the next Samsung flagship, the S9, is released in Q2.

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