Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC To Boast X20 Modem Chip, Efficient Of 1.2Gbps Download Speed

Qualcomm Snapdragon X20 LTE modem will be featured in the upcoming Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip (SoC), according to a LinkedIn profile of one of its employees. Qualcomm is expected to unveil the new Snapdragon 845 SoC next year.

One Senior Staff Engineer at Qualcomm revealed that they are right now working on commercializing the "SDM845 Modem" and the Snapdragon X2, as reported by Android Headlines. This implies that this new high-end gigabit LTE chipset will be used in the next flagship SoC. If this proves to be true then smartphone lovers may end up seeing support for download speeds up to 1.2Gbps with the new SoC.

Snapdragon X20 is a modem with LTE Category 18 support. It offers support for download speeds up to 1.2Gbps. The X20 modem chip is built on 10nm finFET process and offers higher uploads speeds up to 150Mbps, thanks to the use of 2x20MHz Carrier Aggregation, as reported by Phone Radar.

It should be noted that this is not the first time when the chip is in the news; the company had previously announced it once hinting that it will commercialize it in the near future. The company claims that they designed this keeping 5G in mind and with a hope that it will further improve the overall 5G scenario.

While Qualcomm beforehand unveiled one gigabit LTE modem - the Snapdragon X50 - its new chip is the first one of its kind that's available commercially and the first modem in general capable of at the same time receiving LTE data from up to 12 streams. Qualcomm's flagship SoC is said to release sometime in Q1 of 2018 and will be powering most of the flagship smartphones to be launched in 2018.

It is also worth noting that few OEMs also launched the sample chipset previously this year. This definitely hints that a ton of new smartphones with the new SoC can be seen. Some OEMs are already in talks with Qualcomm to acquire the SoC.