Snapdragon 820 goes official amid overheating rumors

Qualcomm has finally gone official with the next-gen Snapdragon 820. The new flagship SoC from Qualcomm comes with new Adreno 530 GPU which is 40% faster than 810's Adreno 430, it delivers faster LTE speeds upto 600 Mbps with the new X12 LTE modem and support for 802.11ad WiFi.

The Snapdragon 820's new custom Kryo cores are built with Samsung's 14nm FinFET process which makes it more power efficient and reduces over-heating which plagued the Snapdragon 810. The new Kryo cores are based on ARMv8 64-bit architecture, and the company says they have worked on the embedded Instruction Sets from the ground up focusing on efficiency.

There's support for ultra-sonic fingerprint authentication which is a newer technology compared to the capacitive sensors being used nowadays. The benefit of ultra-sonic fingerprint authentication lies in the fact that it is not affected by sweat, dirt on the sensor or your fingers. The new powerful Adreno 530 GPU supports 4K displays and streaming at 4K over 802.11ad which gives the SoC support for potential speeds upto 5-6 Gbps in the 60GHz spectrum. 802.11ad is a new standard and at present there are very few routers that support it, but we might see some coming early next year.

Qualcomm has also packed in machine learning to keep a check on malware, the Snapdragon 820 SoC will be able to check suspicious behavior of apps on a hardware level and keep the system secure.

Snapdragon 820 also comes with the new Spectra ISP with which QualComm is once again aiming to make dual-camera setups popular, similar to what we saw with the HTC One M8. The new ISP is capable of using upto 3 cameras at any time, that's 2 at the back and one in the front. It can take pictures up to 25 MP at 30FPS without any shutter lag. The new ISP also promises faster auto-focusing, better HDR algorithms, and better noise-reduction.

All this comes in the wake of rumors of the newly minted SoC overheating. The news gathered steam after it was said that Samsung was looking into over-heating issues with the Snapdragon 820, which the company plans to use in its next flagship, the Galaxy S7. Qualcomm has vehemently denied any such issues, the same as it did with the Snapdragon 810. But there's far less brouhaha this time and the rumors might die out quickly as soon as we see first few devices with 820 start shipping.

Which brings us to the availability of smartphones running on Snapdragon 820. At present there is no timeline as to when we will see the first phones with Snapdragon 820 on-board but we expect some to show up in the first half of 2016. The Snapdragon 810 was a massive failure for Qualcomm and it needs the 820 to succeed. With the 810 the company lost Samsung as its biggest partner, and the loss clearly showed in the company's financial calls. It remains to be seen whether the 820 can challenge the current champ in the arena, Samsung's own Exynos 7420 and the rise of MediaTek with its cost-effective Helio line-up.