The Galaxy S9 is Samsung’s next major smartphone release, a phone that should be unveiled at some point in the first quarter of 2018. Like its predecessor, the phone will pack top of the line hardware, and that includes a new generation of processors. Recent Galaxy S9 rumors also said the phone will enjoy a limited period of exclusivity with the Snapdragon 845, just like the Galaxy S8 did with the Snapdragon 835 this year.
Now, a new report now says Qualcomm will take the wraps off the new Snapdragon 845 chip in early December, so we’ll learn key details about the Galaxy S9’s capabilities long before the phone becomes a reality.
A leak on Weibo found by GizmoChina shows an invitation from Qualcomm for the Snapdragon Technology Summit that takes place in Hawaii during December 4-8. That’s where the Snapdragon 845 is expected to be unveiled.
Unlike last year when Qualcomm released an intermediate flagship chip — the Snapdragon 821 that equipped the Pixel and OnePlus 3T — there’s not going to be a Snapdragon 836 this year. That seems to indicate the Snapdragon 845 will soon hit production and isn’t expected to experience any shortages.
In early 2017, several reports claimed that 10nm chip production issue may affect the rollout of this year’s flagship chips. We then found out that the Galaxy S8 would get first dibs on the Snapdragon 835, a move that crippled flagships that launched before the Galaxy S8.
GizChina says the Snapdragon 845 will be a 10nm chip built on Samsung’s 10nm LPE process. Other specs include Cortex A75 and A53 cores, Adreno 630 GPU, integrated 1.2Gbps X20 modem, support for Wi-Fi 802.11 a/bg/g/n/ac/ad, UFS 2.1 storage and LPDDR4X RAM. Compared to the Snapdragon 835, the new chip should deliver performance gains of up to 25%.
What’s worth mentioning is that Samsung, which manufactures the Snapdragon 835 chip alongside its own 10nm Exynos chip, just announced that it’ll soon be ready to manufacture speedier and more efficient 8nm chips, which could suggest that the Galaxy S9 will ship with such chips inside. Come early December, we may find out exactly what kind of mobile beast the Snapdragon 845 will be. Once that happens, we’ll probably see Samsung come out with its own Snapdragon 845 equivalent that will power next year’s Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9 units outside of the US and a few other markets.
