A logo sits illuminated outside the Qualcomm Inc. pavilion at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, March 2, 2015. (Photo : Pau Barrena/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
When Samsung released the Exynos 7420 chip, it became the benchmark for any newly released chip. There are rumors claiming that the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 system-on-chip will be 50 percent more powerful that Samsung's.
For starters, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 is manufactured using the 14nm FinFET process, according to Phone Arena. It supports Cat 10 LTE which has a theoretical download speed of up to 450Mbps. It also features what Qualcomm calls 4K60 entertainment system which could mean that the chip will support 4K video playback at 60 frames per second.
Despite these impressive specs, not everyone in the tech community is totally convinced that Snapdragon 820 will topple the Exynos 7420 as the best system-on-chip in the market. It is important to remember how big a disappointment the Snapdragon 810 was, with its overheating issues.
Many are also wondering why Qualcomm opted to throw in massive performance upgrade on the Snapdragon 820 when the Snapdragon 810 is already powerful enough. Qualcomm has yet to address the overheating issues of the Snapdragon 810 and the rest of the tech community is hoping that this will not happen with the upcoming Snapdragon 820.
According to Android Authority, there are rumors claiming that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7 will feature the Snapdragon 820 processor. If this is true, then it might mean that the upcoming Qualcomm chip is powerful enough to persuade Samsung to choose it over its own chips.
Some of the confirmed features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 will have is the new Adreno 530 graphics processing unit, an improved Kryo CPU and a Hexagon 680 DSP.
