Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 will bring speed, security and smarts to high-end phones

In early December, Qualcomm revealed its first concrete details of the Snapdragon 845, the next-generation mobile chip that stands a good chance of being in your next smartphone. The 845 will ship in early 2018, and appear in phones sometime after that.

Qualcomm calls the Snapdragon 845 a chip to improve both artificial intelligence and immersion, blending the future of smart devices with the past. At its heart lies the Kryo 385, the semi-custom, upgraded CPU. It’s still an eight-core device, with four performance cores running at 2.8GHz and four energy-efficient cores running at 1.8GHz. That represents a 25- to 30-percent improvement on the existing Snapdragon 835 in the performance cores, and a 15-percent improvement in the smaller, energy-efficient cores.

Phones that use the new Snapdragon 845 will be able to loop more than 20 hours of continuous HD video before expiring, executives said. Those phones will also be able to capture four hours of continuous video playback, or play VR games for over three hours. Talk time, using what Qualcomm calls Ultra HD Voice, will last over