Qualcomm announces fastest-ever Snapdragon 821 processor for upcoming flagship smartphones

Qualcomm has announced its fastest processor yet, the Snapdragon 821, which it claims is 10% faster than its flagship Snapdragon 820 CPU. The chip will debut in smartphones and other devices in the second half of 2016.

The current Snapdragon 820 serves pretty much every high-end Android phone to have appeared thus far in 2016, including the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, HTC 10, LG G5 and even the Xiaomi Mi 5. Rather than serving as a replacement to the chip, the Snapdragon 821 has been designed to extend the shelf-life of Qualcomm's 800 processor range until the company launches its next-generation processor intended for 2017's smartphone elite.

The Snapdragon 821 benefits from a modest performance gain with clock speeds boosted to 2.4GHz (up from 2.1GHz). Other than that, it packs the same quad-core Kyro CPU and X12 LTE modem, which offers download speeds of up to 600Mbps.

Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 821 will appear in a variety of smartphones other mobile devices in the second half of 2016, making it a strong candidate for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and HTC Nexus Sailfish/ Marlin devices. It's also coming to mobile VR head-mounted displays, meaning we may see it crop up in Google Daydream headsets during the tail end of the year.