5 upcoming smartphones powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor

The Snapdragon 810's throttling and overheating problems made the first half of 2015 quite bothersome for chipmaker Qualcomm. After building a reputation for strong, compelling products, the company found itself in the unnatural position of having to defend itself and a compromised chipset against the overwhelming criticism it faced.

Although Qualcomm's PR department did do whatever it could to exercise damage control, the company's upcoming Snapdragon 820 SoC might turn out to be exactly the form of reputation management needed. Over the years, it has been powerful, yet efficient chipsets with custom-designed cores and integrated LTE modems that built the Qualcomm powerhouse across the low, mid, and high-end device tiers. So if the Snapdragon 820 SoC, which will inevitably propel the majority of second-half 2015 and early 2016 flagships, regardless of its reliability, returns to the glory days of awesome Qualcomm chips, everyone will win. The chipmaker. The customers. Even Samsung! How so?

If the prophecy is fulfilled, Samsung will become Qualcomm's manufacturing partner for the SD 820, which will let Qcom take advantage of Sammy's established 14nm FinFET production process to build its most powerful chipset to date. Its CPU integrates four custom 64-bit CPU cores codenamed Kryo, clocked at up to 3GHz each. There's also the new Adreno 530 GPU at play, along with an advanced MDM9X55 LTE-A Cat. 10 modem.

It's way early to predict how the Snapdragon 820 will turn out, but with custom cores and an advanced production process involved, we reckon we should keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best! And to put "hope" into a more material context, here are five Snapdragon 820-powered smartphone "hopefuls" in the making. They shall be announced in the third and fourth quarter of 2015, due for release in early 2016 as Qualcomm and Samsung sort out the SD 820's mass production process.