Qualcomm's next Snapdragon chipset arrives May 20

At the start of the month, speculation arose about a possible delay to Qualcomm’s next set of chipsets. But a more recent leak pointed to an announcement before the end of May and now Qualcomm has confirmed exactly that.

The Snapdragon 7 Gen1 and 8 Gen1+ are on the way

The company behind Snapdragon chipsets has confirmed that it will be hosting an announcement event in China later this week, on May 20. Qualcomm has yet to confirm which chipsets will be making an appearance, though rumors suggest that both the Snapdragon 7 Gen1 and Snapdragon 8 Gen1+ could be unveiled.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen1+ is undoubtedly the most exciting of the two. Building upon the brilliant foundations of the vanilla Gen1, which powers a bunch of flagships, the Gen1+ is set to be built on the 4nm process and offer both a 10% CPU speed boost and battery life improvements.

In other words, devices powered by the Snapdragon Gen1+ should be faster and last longer than those powered by the regular Gen1. The devices that’ll use Qualcomm’s next high-end processor remain to be confirmed, but Motorola’s Frontier could be one of the first.

Samsung’s next foldables — the recently leaked Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Flip 4 — should benefit from the upgraded chipset as well. The Gen1+ is likely to be one of the biggest upgrades since Samsung is planning only small design tweaks.

Moving on to the Snapdragon 7 Gen1, it’s expected to be built upon the 4-nanometer manufacturing process and slot in directly below the Snapdragon 8 series. That means it’ll be used inside slightly cheaper devices, but still offer an impressive level of performance.

On the smartphone front, the new Reno 8 from Oppo, set to debut later this month, could be the first one powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen1. But it won’t remain an Oppo exclusive, so you should expect a range of devices from other brands too.