In August, we came to know that Qualcomm is working on its next chipset on a 7nm manufacturing process with the moniker Snapdragon 855 which is logical since the current high-end chipset is Snapdragon 845. But seems like Qualcomm is working not only on its new chip but also revamped naming convention as it has named the newly certified chip as Snapdragon 8150 or SDM8150 which received Bluetooth certification yesterday.
Folks at XDA Developers were able to spot Snapdragon 8150 moniker on Samsung Galaxy S9 Android Pie 9.0 firmware files which strengthen the speculations before the following screenshot of the certification was available. As of now, we know that the Snapdragon 8150 has passed its Bluetooth certification which took it a step closer towards materializing as actual chipset next year, however, there are several more certifications to clear en route.
The Snapdragon 8150 supports Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and even the latest 802.11ax standard along with 2×2 MIMO with Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy and Bluetooth 5.1. Further, it will reduce the power consumption by up to 67 percent while supporting WPA3 security protocol and other features. My Smart Price claims that it could be paired with Snapdragon X50 5G modem which was released a few weeks ago as the first ever 5G modem that could be affixed on SDM8150 bringing both faster speed and numerous features along with the 5G capability to a smartphone.
Qualcomm has been working on Snapdragon 8150 manufactured on a 7nm process for some time now and it is expected to have significant improvement in benchmark scores over the predecessor SDM845 chipset. Also, the Geekbench scores could be similar to that on Kirin 980 and Apple A12 bionic SoC, both of which were launched last month. According to a leaked GeekBench score, SDM8150 prototype scores 3,697 points on single-core and 10,469 points on multi-core while Kirin 980 SoC scores 3,390 and 10,318 points in single and multi-core respectively. \
Qualcomm could introduce the first ever smartphone carrying 7nm chipset early next year while Samsung is also working on its 7nm Exynos chipset according to a previous press release. Similar to Snapdragon 845 SoC which is seen in all major high-end smartphones this year, Snapdragon 8150 could be available on all premium and high-end smartphones next year but we will have to wait for some time until it clears all the tests and certifications.
