Qualcomm has announced what is technically a new chipset today in the upcoming Snapdragon 850 - and it's probably not what you think. While it could power your next laptop (maybe), you almost certainly won't be seeing the Snapdragon 850 in your next phone.

Qualcomm seems to be changing its processor naming strategy once again, because logically, you'd think the Snapdragon 850 would be the next iteration of its flagship mobile platform, but in fact it's just a Snapdragon 845 designed with laptop and similar form factors specifically in mind. What's that mean? It's not clear exactly, but if you look at the specifications, you'll see a Snapdragon 845 - Kryo 385 CPU cores, Adreno 630 GPU, Hexagon 685 DSP, 1.2Gbps LTE, and Spectra 280 image signal processors.

There is a slight boost to the CPU speed - 2.96GHz here versus 2.8GHz in the 845 - but that's about all we can see as being significantly different.

In the realm of laptop-specific features, there's really not much to go on aside from the fact that Qualcomm is now promising native support in Windows 10 for ARM64 applications via the 64-bit Win32 SDK. There's also support for the 64-bit version of Microsoft's Edge Browser.

Other than that, it's all the changes you'd expect from the 845 over the 835: 30% faster CPU and graphics, better efficiency, and more capable hardware all around. Why exactly Qualcomm felt the need for a name change, we're not honestly sure. No partner devices for the 850 were announced at the time of this posting.