The dust has barely settled on the Galaxy S8, Samsung’s current flagship phone, but that hasn’t stopped rumor mills from kickstarting discussion about its successor. The company has apparently started work on the presumably-called Galaxy S9 and is in talks with Qualcomm about the processor which will run at its heart.
The Aju Business Daily claims that the new chipset will probably be called the Snapdragon 845. Once the development stage is over and done with, either Samsung or Taiwan’s TSMC is supposed to start the manufacturing process for the SoC.
Little is known about the Snapdragon 845’s capabilities at this point of time. There’s no word on Samsung’s own Exynos series of chips either. The brand has traditionally allocated Qualcomm’s chips for markets like the US and its own for regions like India.
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Diving into speculation, the Snapdragon 845 will probably build upon the first-gen 10nm technology of the Snapdragon 835. The latter was notably the first to feature it, improving upon the previous 14nm process with 27% faster speeds and 30% higher energy efficiency.
Samsung recently allowed the world a peek at the second-gen 10nm tech it’s been working on, touting that it increases processing speed by 10% and consumes 15% less energy than the first-gen chipset. The Galaxy S8 is currently the only phone available in the market to run on the Snapdragon 835 SoC because the company hogged the first batch of units for its own phones.
This may happen all over again next year with the Snapdragon 845 CPU and Galaxy S9. We’ll keep our eyes and ears peeled for any more information on the handset till then.