LAS VEGAS— The first smartphone with Qualcomm's new premiere processor is coming from an unexpected place.

At CES today, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf announced that the LeTV Le Max Pro will be the first phone running Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820, the processor that is supposed to vault Qualcomm back into chipset dominance.

I'm not going to downplay Qualcomm's strength too much; the company is still the leading smartphone chip manufacturer. But after it decided to switch from custom cores to standard ARM designs with last year's round of chips, it's seen Samsung and Huawei peel off to power their leading smartphones with their own processors, while Mediatek nips at Qualcomm's heels on the low end.

Along with the basic features of the Snapdragon 820, Qualcomm said the phone uses Qualcomm's ultrasonic SenseID fingerprint scanner, which detects touches under the metal back of the phone, Mollenkopf said. The phone also supports 802.11ad, 60GHz super-fast data transfer between devices that support it, which will enable 4K streaming from the phone to a TV, for instance.

LeTV is a Chinese company that's likely unfamiliar to Westerners. Mollenkopf described it as the "Netflix of China"; it makes a range of phones and streams a huge amount of video to Chinese consumers. This is a big shift from last year's CES, when the Snapdragon 810 debuted with a global launch of the LG G Flex 2.

Qualcomm debuted the Snapdragon 820 in November, and it now says it has 80+ customers for the chip, although it isn't revealing any others. Also at CES, Qualcomm showed an automotive version of the Snapdragon 820 which can help enable self-driving cars.

We don't know much more about the LeTV Le Max Pro; I can't find anything else about the Web on it, and LeTV's website is entirely in Chinese. We'll hunt it down here at the show.