These could be the specs of the Snapdragon chipset that'll power 2022 flagships

The Snapdragon 888 is fairly new and its successor is only expected to be announced sometime in December. However, leaks have already started pouring in for Qualcomm’s next marquee chipset that’ll power flagship phones in 2022.

Reliable tipster Evan Blass has revealed what could be the complete spec sheet of the SM8450. The model number of the Snapdragon 888 is SM8350 so it would only be fair to assume that SM8450 is its direct descendant.

According to Blass, the upcoming Snapdragon silicon will make the transition from the 5nm to 4nm manufacturing process. This should result in faster performance and improved power efficiency.

The chip is also expected to get the new integrated Snapdragon X65 5G modem, up from the X60 5G modem that runs inside the Snapdragon 888. The new system promises 10Gbps theoretical download speeds and should offer more stable 5G connectivity.

Elsewhere, you can expect to see spec upgrades in the form of the Adreno 730 GPU, and Spectra 680 ISP. You can view the complete leaked specs of the Snapdragon 888 successor in Blass’ tweet embedded above.

The leaked info also points to the use of a Kryo 780 CPU built on the Arm v9 architecture. Arm announced its first CPUs built on this architecture last month, consisting of the heavyweight Cortex-X2, the Cortex-A710, and the lightweight Cortex-A510. So if it’s anything like the Snapdragon 888, we can expect one Cortex X2 CPU core, three Cortex-A710 cores, and four A510 cores.

We first heard about the Snapdragon 888 successor with model number SM8450 back in March. The chipset is apparently codenamed “Waipio,” after the Waipi’o Valley in Hawaii. The previous leak revealed that Qualcomm’s engineers are testing samples of the chip with 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS memory.

Qualcomm may be planning some major imaging improvements this time around. The new chip is supposedly using a new camera module designated “Leica 1.” Of course, this doesn’t mean future flagships will come with Leica cameras. The partnership could however point to Leica optimizing the ISP of the new chip.