We have long known that Qualcomm works on a new SoC that will complement the Snapdragon 820 flagship. The expected name of the chip was Snapdragon 823 but this has turned to be incorrect – at the official launch event Qualcomm named the chip Snapdragon 821.
The main new feature of the new SoC is the increased clock speed of the “fast” Kryo cores inside – now they can work at up to 2.4 GHz. As a comparison the top speed of the Snapdragon 820 is 2.2 GHz. The “slow” cores inside the Snapdragon 821, designed for less intensive tasks, now work at up to 2 GHz, up from 1.6 GHz in Snapdragon 820. There’s no information on the GPU core inside but we suspect we will get the same Adreno 530 chip that has probably been clocked higher. All the remaining specs seem to be the same.
The first devices on Snapdragon 821 are expected soon.
Source: Qualcomm