Qualcomm is going strong with the hype for its upcoming flagship system-on-a-chip (SoC) the Snapdragon 820. We’ve heard some good things about their new custom Kryo cores, the Hexagon 680 DSP for signal processing, and the new Adreno 530 GPU among others. Qualcomm is giving us one more reason to pick a flagship phone with an SD820 come Q1 of 2016, and it’s a good one – X12 LTE, the speediest data connection on a smartphone yet.
For the record, X12 LTE will give you a downlink speed of – wait for it – 600 freaking Mbps at LTE Cat 12, that’s over half a gigabit per second, potentially. Plus you get LTE Cat 13 upload speeds of 150Mbps, so that if you data plan can hack it, you can keep uploading high definition images and videos to the cloud. Then you get the LTE-U (unlicensed) feature. That is, carriers who have LTE-U will usually put signal repeaters the size of wifi routers in heavy usage places like airports and events. You SD820-powered phone will be able to get an LTE-U connection and aggregate it with your carrier’s standard LTE signal so that it treats it as one stream. More bandwith, basically.
The SD820 will also give you support for Qualcomm’s MU-MIMO WiFi feature, speeding up your connection at least three or four times the normal. It even supports the newest flavor of WiFi – 802.11ad – which gives you multi-gigabit speeds, because you need to be able to send and stream stuff without the buffering.
Of course, this all is potential, and it needs your carrier and your home to rise up to the infrastructure and hardware challenge. Networks are slowly getting there with X12 LTE, so hopefully by next year, this will be more relevant. Upgrading your WiFi network at home will also need to be done, if you want to enjoy these speeds. That said, Qualcomm sure is setting us up for a great chipset, and the SD820 needs the world to catch up with it.
SOURCE: Qualcomm
