Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon 845 could debut on the Samsung Galaxy S9

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Samsung could get the first crack at Qualcomm’s next high-end processor, which is reportedly a good step up from what’s out there now.

Qualcomm’s next high-end smartphone chip could be the Snapdragon 845. That’s according to the San Diego, California-based company’s website, which briefly revealed the chip ahead of a press event in Beijing.

Qualcomm’s website didn’t give much away, but rumors suggest the Snapdragon 845 is a leap ahead of the current generation. It’s reportedly expected to be fabricated on a 7nm process, meaning it’ll have a smaller physical footprint and perform between 25 percent and 35 percent better than its predecessor.

Samsung is likely to get first dibs. The company’s chip division teamed up with Qualcomm to develop the Snapdragon 835, which offered a 40 percent increase in power efficiency and 27 percent better performance than the previous iteration. Unsurprisingly, the next-gen Snapdragon 845 is expected to debut on Samsung’s Galaxy S9, due out early next year.

The inadvertent reveal comes after rumblings in April, which suggested Samsung and Qualcomm had begun developing the successor to the Snapdragon 835 — the chip inside Samsung’s Galaxy S8.

The 7nm process is a growing trend. In January, chip fabricator TSMC, whose clientele includes Apple, MediaTek, and AMD, among others, began finalizing a prototype design for a 7nm chip, which it expects to enter mass production as soon as early as the second half of this year.

Qualcomm is expected to a midrange chips, the Snapdragon 660, in early May. It’s the successor to the Snapdragon 652, and may come with processor cores total — four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.9GHz, and four A53 cores clocked at 1.9GHz. It’ll reportedly ship with high-speed UFS 2.1 storage, two LPDDR4 RAM modules clocked at 1866MHz, support for cameras up to 24-megapixels, LTE Cat. 10, and Qualcomm’s Adreno 512 graphics chip.

The Snapdragon 660 may ship first on Nokia’s eponymous Nokia 7 and Nokia 8, Xiaomi’s Mi 6 Lite, and Samsung’s upcoming C10 smartphone.

Qualcomm is also expected to launch the Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 635, enhanced versions of the company’s Snapdragon 625, at its Beijing event. They reportedly pack eight processor cores — two sets of four Cortex-A53 with a clock speed of between 2.0GHz and 2.2GHz — and an Adreno 506 graphics chip or better. They’re expected to support LPDDR3 memory and LTE Cat. 7.