A first look at the Galaxy S21 SoC from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 875

The Galaxy S21 is expected to rely on the prowess of Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 875 SoC, at least in markets where it won't be equipped with an Exynos chipset instead. Neither of these future silicons have been announced yet, but 91Mobiles has apparently gained some information about the Snapdragon 875 SoC from an unknown source.

Since Qualcomm is expected to unveil the SoC in December, this early leak may or may not be accurate, but the information broadly makes sense. So, let's take a closer look at what the Snapdragon 875-powered Galaxy S21 might be capable of.

New Kryo 685 CPU Cores and Adreno 660 GPU

Although this early apparent leak doesn't detail any exact numbers in terms of core count or frequencies, the source claims that the Snapdragon 875 will be equipped with new Kryo 685 cores – likely eight of them. As expected, the SoC will also be integrated with Qualcomm's X60 5G modem. This component will actually be manufactured by Samsung itself, even though the Snapdragon 875 will be created in TSMC's facilities.

The new Kryo 685 CPU cores will work in conjunction with a new GPU dubbed the Adreno 660. It makes sense, given that the ongoing Snapdragon 865 powering the Galaxy S20 series in some markets has an Adreno 650 graphics chip. The next-gen GPU will likely boast more than 1250 GFLOPS.

Other details mentioned by the source include an Adreno 665 VPU (vector processing unit), an Adreno 1095 DPU (data processing unit), a Spectra 580 ISP (image signal processor) whereas the Snapdragon 865 has a Spectra 480, and support for quad-channel PoP high-speed LPDDR5 RAM.

It's unclear how Samsung's own Exynos 1000 SoC will compare to Qualcomm's solution, but the tech giant gave up on its custom cores and the next chipset is also said to be using AMD graphics, so it could be a strong contender. We'll have to wait until the later part of 2020 or early 2021 to find out with certainty.