“This year’s Snapdragon Technology Summit will feature an inside look at the latest innovations built into Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platforms, along with demonstrations that exhibit upcoming technologies and advancements that will continue to shape the way we use mobile devices, always connected PCs and other future technologies,” the company says.
Qualcomm is expected to reveal the Snapdragon 845 mobile processor slated to arrive in early 2018. It will follow the company’s current flagship processor, the Snapdragon 835, and supposedly provide better single-core performance than Apple’s A9 chip used in the iPhone 6S, and the fifth-generation iPad released in 2017. That information is based on benchmarks leaked in September, which likely don’t fully show the 845 chip’s optimized performance numbers.
The Snapdragon 845 will likely be the processor of choice for Samsung’s unannounced Galaxy S9 phones. It was also recently listed in a since-removed job listing for Microsoft’s Redmond-based campus, indicating that the company may be working on a first-party, Surface-branded device based on the chip. But it won’t appear in the first batch of Windows-based laptops slated to hit the market before the end of December.
As previously reported, the ARM-based Windows 10 laptops will rely on Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 835 chip. These will be manufactured by Asus, HP, and Lenovo, including two 12-inch models produced by HP with 4GB of memory and 128GB of storage, and 8GB of memory with 256GB of storage. The Asus model was already spotted on Geekbench running at a base speed of 2.21GHz.
That all said, the keynote will likely officially launch the Snapdragon 835-based laptops while also promising performance improvements for future next-generation models packing the Snapdragon 845. The latter chip was accidentally revealed by Qualcomm early this year when a page appeared in its CreatePoint Portal bearing the “SDM845” identifier. Microsoft’s recent listing of the chip in its job offering only solidified what we already saw through benchmarks and “accidental” listings.
“We will be joined on stage by several major industry leaders who we are collaborating with to enable many significant technological achievements that will change the way we use our smartphones and other mobile devices,” says Cristiano Amon.
