Qualcomm had launched its latest flagship chip, Snapdragon 888, in December of 2020. Since its launch, the new chip has made its way to many flagship smartphones such as the Galaxy S21 series, Mi 11 series, and ROG Phone 5 series. The company has now unveiled a new SoC – Snapdragon 888 Plus during the first day of the MWC (Mobile World Congress) Barcelona 2021 event.
The Snapdragon 888 Plus is basically an overclocked variant of the Snapdragon 888. In particular, the clock speed of the Kryo 680 Prime core (based on ARM Cortext-X1) has been boosted to 2.995GHz from the earlier 2.84GHz. The remaining cores — 3x ARM Cortex A78-based cores running at 2.4GHz and 4x Cortex A55-based efficiency cores clocked at 1.8GHz, are unchanged. There’s no upgrade to the GPU this time around. Instead of GPU, Qualcomm has decided to focus on AI performance this year. The 6th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine on the Snapdragon 888 Plus now offers 32 TOPS AI performance, a 20% performance increase from the 26 TOPS AI performance offered by the Snapdragon 888.
The rest of the specifications of the Snapdragon 888 Plus, including the Spectra 580 ISP, the Snapdragon X60 5G modem, connectivity features, and so on, are all the same as the Snapdragon 888. Qualcomm says commercial devices featuring the new Snapdragon 888 Plus chip are expected to hit the market in the third quarter of 2021. ASUS, Xiaomi, HONOR, Motorola, and Vivo are among the list of OEMs who have confirmed to launch a new flagship with the chipset.