Qualcomm today unveiled its latest high-end Snapdragon chipset: the Snapdragon 821. The chipset is essentially a higher clocked version of the Snapdragon 820 chip from the company. 

While the Kyro cores inside the Snapdragon 820 are clocked at 2.15GHz, the Snapdragon 821 has them clocked at 2.4GHz leading to a 10% improvement in performance as per Qualcomm.  There should also be some improvement in power efficiency due to a matured 14nm FinFET fabrication process. The Adreno 530 GPU inside the chipset is also clocked slightly higher at 650Mhz vs. the 624Mhz clock speed of the GPU on the Snapdragon 820 chip.

The company clarifies that the Snapdragon 821 chipset is not meant to replace its popular Snapdragon 820 chip, but instead “complement and extend” their Snapdragon 800 lineup. Other specs of the Snapdragon 821 chip remain the same as the Snapdragon 820. This includes an X12 LTE modem that is capable of supporting download speeds of up to 600Mbps, Ultra HD Voice support, Spectra ISP, and more.

Qualcomm expects Snapdragon 821 powered devices to make their way to the market in the second half of 2016. This means that we should see the likes of the Galaxy Note 7 and the upcoming Nexus handsets from Google and HTC make use of this chipset.