Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 821 is 10 percent faster than the 820

Qualcomm has announced a new flagship mobile processor called the Snapdragon 821. The 821 is a slight update to the Snapdragon 820 that debuted in smartphones earlier this year and promises modest performance gains.

The 820 has been found in virtually every high-end Android smartphone this year, including Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, the HTC 10, the LG G5, the OnePlus 3, and the Xiaomi Mi5. In our experience, we’ve found it to be quite a capable chip, with great performance and efficient power utilization. It’s a far cry from last year’s Snapdragon 810, which was plagued with performance and thermal issues.

Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 821 builds upon the 820’s features, but provides a 10 percent performance increase. Its quad-core CPU runs at 2.4GHz. The company says it will debut in smartphones and other devices in the second half of this year. Perhaps we’ll see it first appear in the next Samsung Galaxy Note?