The Snapdragon 820 is going to be ridiculously fast in every way

The Snapdragon 810 wasn’t a failure, but it was definitely a disappointment, and it looks like Qualcomm is trying to make up for that by packing tons of new features and improved performance into the chip’s successor: the Snapdragon 820. The company already had us excited for the next-generation SoC when it announced that not only will it be significantly more powerful than its predecessor, it’ll use less power as well, but that was only the beginning. Now Qualcomm is teasing some of the Snapdragon 820’s connectivity features, but since there’s a lot of information that was released, I’ll just sum it up briefly: the Snapdragon 820 is really, really, really fast. 

Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), has integrated its newly upgraded X12 LTE modem into its upcoming Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 820 processor, providing leading 4G LTE and Wi-Fi technologies for premium tier mobile devices. The new Snapdragon 820 processor addresses unprecedented demand for blazing fast connectivity and seamless services. This is the first publicly announced processor for use in mobile devices to support LTE Category 12 in the downlink and Category 13 in the uplink, providing up to 33 percent and 200 percent improvement over its predecessor’s download and upload speeds, respectively. Also available as a discrete chipset, the X12 LTE modem has demonstrated peak download speeds of up to 600 Mbps through 3x downlink carrier aggregation and 256-QAM, as well as peak upload speeds of up to 150 Mbps through 2x uplink carrier aggregation and 64-QAM. The Snapdragon 820 processor is also the first publicly announced processor to offer LTE support for 4×4 Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO), designed to double download throughput speeds on a single LTE carrier.