Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 will be 'world's first' 7nm SoC when it debuts next year

Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 won't be making it into smartphones until 2019

Qualcomm's forthcoming Snapdragon 855 smartphone CPU will reportedly be the 'world's first' 7nm SoC.

That's according to tech tipster Roland Quandt, who claims that the successor to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 is currently in development and will be the first chip to be built on the 7nm FinFET production process.

The quote provided in the tweet was taken from a LinkedIn profile of a Bengaluru, India-based employee of Tessolve, a semiconductor engineering company, according to a report at Android Headlines.

Quant also mentioned that the Snapdragon 855 will ship with Qualcomm's newly-launched X24 LTE modem built-in, which the firm claims will offer download speeds up to 2Gbps and is also built on the 7nm process.

With the firm's latest Snapdragon 845 SoC - which packs Qualcomm's X20 modem, capable of 1.2Gbps download speeds - set to debut in the Galaxy S9 later this month, it's likely that the firm's new Category 20 modem will make its debut inside next year's Galaxy S10.

We don't know much else about the upcoming Snapdragon 855, but rumours claim that while Qualcomm has been developing its high-end CPUs in partnership with Samsung's foundry business for many years now, the 7nm processor will likely be manufactured by Taiwan's TSMC.

According to reports from late 2017, TSMC has begun building the 'world's first' semiconductor plant that, it claims, will be able to support the creation of 3nm node silicon chips.

Given that it'll be the 'first' 7nm SoC, you can also expect a drastic reduction in power draw and increased performance. However, it's unlikely we'll be hearing much more until next year - and when it does appear, it could well be as a Broadcom Snapdragon, rather than under the Qualcomm moniker.