Leak: Qualcomm's next flagship chip could come with Leica camera smarts

It’s no surprise that Qualcomm is already working on a Snapdragon 888 successor. The new flagship processor can be expected to launch in December just like most of its predecessors, and we now have a few details about it thanks to WinFuture’s Roland Quandt.

After outing information about a lower-end Snapdragon 888 variant, Quandt now claims that Qualcomm is already testing early samples of its next premium processor. The leaker says that the chip is codenamed Waipio, after the Waipi’o Valley in Hawaii.

Qualcomm has a known practice of internally naming its products after places in Hawaii. For instance, the Snapdragon 888 was codenamed Lahaina, after a city in Maui, one of the eight Hawaiian Islands.

Quandt also reveals that the upcoming Snapdragon chip bears model number SM8450, in line with the Snapdragon 888’s model name SM8350.

Qualcomm’s engineers are apparently testing samples of the chip with 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS memory.

The company could be planning some major imaging improvements as it’s apparently using a new camera module internally named Leica 1.

As you might already know, Leica is a German camera company that’s lent its expertise to smartphones from Nokia and HUAWEI in the past. A tie-up with Qualcomm could mean improved imaging skills on Android flagships from the get-go.

Of course, just the appearance of an internal codename is not enough proof of Qualcomm’s partnership with Leica. Quandt himself isn’t sure about what the codename means and we’ll need more evidence to corroborate this theory. The same also applies to other information in this article as it doesn’t come from official sources.