Qualcomm decides to change up its naming scheme for future Snapdragon chipsets

We’re expecting Qualcomm to announce its flagship processor, likely the Snapdragon 898, in a couple of weeks. But the company made a surprise announcement today (via 9to5Google), that it will be “separating” the Snapdragon branding entirely. Moving forward, this means that you will no longer see “Qualcomm Snapdragon 898”, and instead, will see just “Snapdragon” as a standalone name.

The move doesn’t come as too much of a shock if you look at Qualcomm’s naming for other products such as the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue in that instance, but we can expect future chipsets to be named as such.

This means our mobile platforms will transition to a single-digit series and generation number, aligning with other product categories – starting with our newest flagship Snapdragon 8-series platform.

Another change coming soon will be the removal of “5G” from the names of different chipsets. This also doesn’t come as much of a surprise since just about every Qualcomm processor already includes 5G connectivity and the company states it has “become ubiquitous across our Snapdragon Portfolio”. Finally, Qualcomm confirmed that the use of colors in future chipset releases will have different meanings. For example, the use of Gold will represent premium devices, while we will also see the likes of Midnight, Gunmetal, Nickel, and Snapdragon Red. 

Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 898 chipset is set to power many of the future flagship devices expected to be released at the tail-end of 2021 and into 2022. This includes the Xiaomi 12, which could debut as early as December, while Motorola is also rumored to be introducing a new flagship using the upcoming chipset. From there, the likely candidates of OnePlus and Samsung will also be using whatever Qualcomm has planned for the Galaxy S22 and OnePlus 10 series.

In terms of performance, the SD898 is expected to feature Arm’s Cortex-X2 prime core clocked at 3.0Ghz, along with three Cortex-A710 cores and four Cortex-A510 cores. We’re also expecting to see the SD898 debut with the Adreno 730 GPU which could provide up to 20% improvement to performance thanks to being built on the 4nm process.

Qualcomm’s next major chipset announcement is set to take place on November 30th, at which point we’ll learn more about the future of Snapdragon-powered smartphones.