Phone makers release new flagships every six to 12 months, which is a difficult pace to match if you're a chipmaker whose designs take between two and three years to make. That time gap is why chips like Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 821 exist—to give companies like Samsung and LG something "new" to use without going back to the drawing board and creating something from scratch.

The 821 is about as exciting a refresh as its model number implies: its Kryo CPU cores will run at a maximum clock speed of 2.4GHz, a roughly 10 percent increase from the 2.15GHz cores in the Snapdragon 820. There's no word on whether the 821's two slower cores in the CPU will be faster than the 1.6GHz in the current chip. Qualcomm's press release doesn't mention the GPU's speed increasing, and it says specifically that the 821 will use the same 600Mbps Snapdragon X12 LTE modem as the 820.

The clock-bumped Snapdragon 821 will be sold alongside the two Snapdragon 820 models. Qualcomm isn't saying which phones will use the 821, but rumors suggest that at least one of the two new HTC-made Nexus phones will include the faster chip. Enjoy your extra clock speed.