There have been many leaks concerning the hardware specifications of the Galaxy Note 7 which suggest that the upcoming flagship is going to use Samsung's Exynos 8893 processor in developing markets and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 processor in markets like the United States. Qualcomm today officially introduced the Snapdragon 821 which is a slightly improved version of the Snapdragon 820 that powers some variants of the Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 edge.
Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 821 delivers a 10 percent improvement in performance over its predecessor as well as greater power efficiency and application performance. The Qualcomm Kryo quad-core CPU reaches speeds of up to 2.4GHz but it has the same X12 LTE modem as the Snapdragon 820. The company hasn't said which devices will be powered by this processor but does mention that we can expect commercial devices powered by the 821 in the second half of this year. The Galaxy Note 7 fits in that timeline perfectly. Samsung mass produced the Snapdragon 820 for Qualcomm on its 14nm LPP process but it's unclear at this point in time if it's going to be mass producing the Snapdragon 821 as well.
