The architecture’s successor, “Krait”, was introduced in 2011 and featured asynchronous symmetrical multi-processing: cores can adjust their clock speed and voltage independent to each other.

[2] On the announcement of Snapdragon 800 in 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, Qualcomm renamed their prior models to the 200, 400 and 600 series.

[35]In early 2011, Qualcomm announced Krait,[36] an in-house CPU microarchitecture design supporting the ARM v7 instruction set.

SoCs featuring Krait were named S4 supports asynchronous symmetrical multi-processing (aSMP), meaning each processor core adjusted its clock speed and voltage based on the device's activity in order to optimize battery usage.

[39] In a Quadrant benchmark test, which assesses raw processing power, a dual-core Krait processor had a score of 4,952, whereas the quad-core Tegra 3 was just under 4,000.

[41] Adoption of Snapdragon contributed to Qualcomm's transition from a wireless modem company to one that also produces a wider range of hardware and software for mobile devices.

[42] In July 2011 Qualcomm acquired certain assets from GestureTek in order to incorporate its gesture recognition intellectual property into Snapdragon SoCs.

[44] That November Qualcomm acquired some assets from EPOS Development in order to integrate its stylus and gesture recognition technology into Snapdragon products.

[46] By 2012, the Snapdragon S4 (Krait core) had taken a dominant share from other Android system-on-chips like Nvidia Tegra and Texas Instruments OMAP which caused the latter to exit the market.

[47] As of July 2014, the market share of Android phones had grown to 84.6 percent,[48] and Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips powered 41% of smartphones.

[49] The debut of Apple's 64-bit A7 chip in the iPhone 5S forced Qualcomm to rush out a competing 64-bit solution, despite the capable performance of the Snapdragon 800/801/805, since their existing Krait cores were only 32-bit.

They suffered from overheating problems and throttling, particularly the 810, which led to Samsung ditching Snapdragon for its Galaxy S6 flagship phone.

[54] In early 2016, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 820, an ARM 64-bit quad-core processor using in-house designed Kryo cores.

[58] At Computex 2017 in May, Qualcomm and Microsoft announced plans to launch Snapdragon-based laptops running Windows 10.

Qualcomm partnered with HP, Lenovo, and Asus to release slim portables and 2-in-1 devices powered by the Snapdragon 835.

[61][62][63] As of 2018,[update] Asus, HP and Lenovo have begun selling laptops with Snapdragon-based CPUs running Windows 10 on ARM under the name "Always Connected PCs".

[65][66] The Snapdragon 888 announced in December 2020 is the first Qualcomm SoC to feature ARM's Cortex-X series CPU architecture.

[75] In January 2014, Qualcomm introduced a modified version of the Snapdragon 600 called 602A[76] that is intended for in-car infotainment screens, backup cameras, and other driver assistance products.

[89] Snapdragon is to be the primary shirt sponsor for English football club Manchester United starting with the 2024–25 season, replacing the German company TeamViewer.