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The next round of awesome smartphones may have a mighty new chip and 8GB of RAM

Samsung Galaxy Note 5
Image used with permission by copyright holder
There’s talk of a new Qualcomm processor coming to take the Snapdragon 820’s range-topping crown, and it may end up inside some if the biggest, and most exciting smartphones likely to launch during the second half of 2016. It’s being called the Snapdragon 823, and apparently will be another quad-core chip, capable of running at speeds up to 3GHz and packing a gigantic 8GB of RAM.

Yes, 8GB. That’s twice what we’re seeing inside the very best hardware available at the moment, and more than rumors are placing on traditionally powerful hardware like the Galaxy Note 6. In fact, the Snapdragon 823 and its giant 8GB of RAM is being linked to Samsung’s next phablet whopper, making existing chat about the phone featuring 6GB of RAM sound a bit modest.

However, while the thought of such formidable hardware is always exciting, there’s no evidence of these rumors being factual just yet. The source is from popular social networking site Weibo, and although there has been talk of a Snapdragon 823 in the recent past, it’s not an official product from Qualcomm yet.

This hasn’t stopped the speculation, and the Snapdragon 823 has been linked not only with the Galaxy Note 6, but also with plenty of other phones. For example, rumors regarding a Xiaomi Mi Note 2 included talk of the chip last month, while the same Weibo source discussing the Note 6 also said the Snapdragon 823 would arrive inside an unnamed Sony Xperia phone, and the LG G Flex 3.

The last name on this list sounds suspicious. The G Flex 2 is more than a year old now, and the last we heard, LG had decided to concentrate its efforts on the LG G5 and a sequel to the LG V10 in 2016, following a lackluster reception to the curved G Flex 2. Plans change all the time, and perhaps this source has new information, but for now it’s another side to an existing rumor — which means we shouldn’t take any of it as fact.

If a Snapdragon 823 is coming to power the Note 6, then Qualcomm will likely want to reveal it officially before Samsung publicly launches the phone, so more may be learned over the coming months.

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Andy Boxall
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
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