It was only a matter of time before Qualcomm's flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 888, was replaced by a better model. And judging by these first few details, it may very well be a big step forward.

The news comes from longtime established leaker Evan Blass, who has been working on the Snapdragon 888 for some time now. Apparently, not only will this chip be smaller than the Snapdragon 888 (4nm instead of 5nm), but it will also improve both power and efficiency.

The Snapdragon 888 is at the top end of Qualcomm's portfolio and is found in high-end smartphones such as Samsung's Galaxy S21 series and OnePlus 9. Qualcomm will naturally take everything the 888 has to offer and improve it for future phones.

This is especially important given the increasingly competitive nature of the mobile chip industry. According to our tests, the Snapdragon 888 may be more powerful than previous Android devices, but Qualcomm is already lagging behind Apple's A-series chips.

According to our own benchmark tests, the recently released iPhone 12 (and A14 Bionic) easily outperformed Samsung's Galaxy S21 and S21 Ultra, which are powered by the Snapdragon 888.

Additionally, there is a growing trend of handset manufacturers developing custom-made chips rather than using Qualcomm chips. Samsung has famously used Exynos chipsets outside of the US market for several years, but rumors suggest that the Google Pixel 6 will feature chips developed in-house.

Blass also claims that the upcoming Snapdragon flagship will feature an Adreno 730 GPU; the GPU in the Snapdragon 888 is an Adreno 660, while last year's Snapdragon 865 was an Adreno 650, so this change in numbers is particularly interesting.

While the product numbering doesn't tell us anything specific, we are curious as to why such a big jump is being set up; PhoneArena notes that the last time the numbers jumped this high was with the Snapdragon 845, which coincided with a significant performance increase. Snapdragon 845, which coincided with a significant increase in performance. We expect the same situation this time around.

But in any case, the 2022 Android flagship is going to be something special. We will report on this new chip as soon as we have more information.