Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ 5G Announced, a Small Upgrade Over Snapdragon 888

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 888+ SoC at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2021 event. The new chipset is a slightly advanced variant of the Snapdragon 888 that was announced in December last year. The Snapdragon 888+ is extremely similar to the Snapdragon 888, and the only upgrades come in the form of a slightly higher clock speed for the Cortex-X1 CPU core and improved AI performance. Looking at the specifications, we don’t think that there will be any noticeable performance improvement in day-to-day tasks as well as gaming.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ announced

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ has two major upgrades over the Snapdragon 888. Firstly, Qualcomm has bumped up the clock speed of the Cortex-X1 CPU core from 2.84GHz in the Snapdragon 888 to 2.995GHz in the Snapdragon 888+. The second upgrade is that the new chipset has better AI performance. While the Snapdragon 888 has 26 TOPS AI, the Snapdragon 888+ has 32 TOPS AI. The rest of the specifications of the two chipsets remain the same.

Apart from the Cortex-X1 CPU clocked at 2.995GHz, which I mentioned earlier, the Snapdragon 888+ has three Cortex-A78 CPU cores clocked at 2.42GHz and four Cortex-A55 CPU cores running at 1.80GHz. In terms of graphics, you get Adreno 660 GPU running at 840MHz. The chipset supports LPDDR5 RAM at up to 3200MHz frequency.

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When it comes to imaging, the SoC can handle these camera setups: a single 200MP sensor, a single 84MP sensor with zero shutter lag (ZSL), a 64MP+25MP setup with ZSL, or three 28MP sensors with ZSL. It also supports up to 8K30 and 4K120 videos. Coming to connectivity, the Snapdragon 888+ has an X60 integrated modem with support for the 5G network. Oh, by the way, the Snapdragon 888+ uses the same Samsung 5nm fabrication process just like the Snapdragon 888.

Qualcomm has announced that Asus, Honor, Vivo, and Xiaomi are partner vendors for this chipset, which means that these brands will soon launch smartphones/tablets with the Snapdragon 888+ SoC. Strangely, Qualcomm didn’t mention Samsung. So, it looks like Samsung will be sticking to the Snapdragon 888 chipset for now and directly make a move to the successor of the Snapdragon 888+.