While its Snapdragon 845 SoC is being used by virtually every high-end smartphone on the market, Qualcomm has been hard at work with its next 7nm mobile processor. Otherwise known as the Snapdragon 8150.
Specifically, the Snapdragon 8150 SoC was recently given Bluetooth certification from SIG Labs, and has been given the model number SM8150. On top of that, the name also seems to be part of a rebranding effort on Qualcomm’s part. Suggesting that the previous Snapdragon 855 name may or may not be used as the official designation of another product.
According to XDA, it is highly rumoured that the Snapdragon 8150 will be the first Qualcomm SoC that will come with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). If this is true, the SoC would finally be joining the ranks of both Apple and Huawei. Both of which have already launched their own respective NPU-attached processors last year with the A11 Bionic and Kirin 970.
Other benefits that will supposedly come with the Snapdragon 8150 are better power efficiency and faster performance (naturally). According to the certification, it looks like the Snapdragon 8150 will also support 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO and Bluetooth 5.0 LE. On that note, the SoC looks set to feature Qualcomm’s X24 LTE modem, which is capable of supporting transfer speeds of 2Gbps.
Qualcomm’s 7nm Snapdragon 8150 is already in production, and sources are saying that the upcoming mobile processor is already being sample by specific smartphone makers, one of which could be Samsung. What this means for us is that we could be looking at the Android smartphones running on the new processor as early as the first half of 2019.
(Source: XDA, MySmartPrice via Hot Hardware)
