At the moment. Qualcomm's best chipset yet, the Snapdragon 835, is only powering a few high-end smartphones, but rumors about its successor are already flying around the air. Expected to carry the Snapdragon 845 moniker, this upcoming chip is rumored to pack two clusters of Qualcomm's new Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 cores, working in concert thanks to the big.LITTLE architecture.

The latest rumors call for a 10nm manufacturing process of the chipset, which is in contrast with the enticing 7nm we've heard before. Remember, when it comes to chips and fabrication processes, the smaller the manufacturing process, the more energy-efficient the chipset is. Overall, Qualcomm's next top-tier chipset is expected to be 30% more powerful than the Snapdragon 835 when it comes to single-core performance and over 70% snappier at multi-core tasks while retaining the overall power efficiency, which will be a serious improvement on all fronts.

The big: Cortex-A75

Word on the street is that the Snapdragon's 845 "powerful" cluster will be comprising Cortex-A75 cores. These are expected to boast a 20% performance increase over the preceding Cortex-A73 cores while consuming the same amount of energy. The A75 will reportedly also support clock speeds up to 3.0GHz, which is 200MHz more than the Cortex-A73. Alleged Geekbench 4 benchmarks of the Cortex-A75 processor indicate around 34% performance increase versus the previous Cortex-A73, a cluster of which was the workhorse inside Huawei's Kirin 960 chipset.

Faster, more efficient Snapdragon 845 gets leaked: 10nm process, Cortex-A75 and A55 cores inside
Faster, more efficient Snapdragon 845 gets leaked: 10nm process, Cortex-A75 and A55 cores inside
Cortex A75 rumored specs, features, benchmarks
Cortex A75 rumored specs, features, benchmarks
The LITTLE: Cortex-A55

Тhe "efficient" set of cores on the Snapdragon 845 will likely consist of Cortex-A55 cores. They are expected to be twice as powerful as the preceding Cortex-A53 cores while also improving the energy efficiency by 15%. As far as benchmarks go, Geekbench 4 allegedly reveals that the Cortex-A55 is around 21% more powerful than the Cortex-A53, which was ticking inside Qualcomm's Snapdragon 625.

Yet, the biggest new feature of Cortex-A55 is its configurability: up to eight Cortex-A55 CPU cores might comprise a single cluster, which is twice as many as the current four-core clusters of Qualcomm's chipsets. For example, the aforementioned Snapdragon 625 is an octa-core chip, but its cores are split into two clusters of four, connected by a bus that transfers data. Eliminating this bus and bundling the eight cores on a single custer is potentially a huge improvement because it will dramatically speed up data transfer between the different cores of the cluster.

Faster, more efficient Snapdragon 845 gets leaked: 10nm process, Cortex-A75 and A55 cores inside
Faster, more efficient Snapdragon 845 gets leaked: 10nm process, Cortex-A75 and A55 cores inside
Cortex A5 rumored specs, features, and benchmarks
Cortex A5 rumored specs, features, and benchmarks

Rumors also call for an Adreno 630 GPU to come on deck the Snapdragon 845. It's expected to be 30% more powerful than the Adreno 530 graphics-crunching unit inside the Snapdragon 835.

We take these rumors with the usual grain of salt, but we can't lie - they are moderately amping up our interest towards the next generation of flagship chipsets.