Qualcomm has finally unveiled the Snapdragon 888 Plus, the long-awaited mid-year update to its flagship chipset for Snapdragon 888 phones.
The 888 Plus improves CPU and AI performance, while still offering 5G compatibility, and more interestingly, there are already five major phone makers that have committed to using the new silicon.
This is what you need to know.
When will the Snapdragon 888 Plus arrive on smartphones?
There’s always a bit of a lag between the announcement of a chipset and the arrival of the first phones to use it, and it’s no different.
Although some brands have already announced their plans for the new chip, Qualcomm says the first phones using the 888+ are expected to be announced in the third quarter of 2021, which is July, August and September.
What phones will the 888+ use?
The phones haven’t been announced in detail yet, but we do know something.
On the one hand, Qualcomm’s press release cites five major brands that have committed to using the new chip: Honor, Asus, Xiaomi, Vivo and Motorola.
Asus has promised that the phone will appear “on the ROG Phone,” which suggests we may see an updated version of the ROG Phone 5 with the 888+.
For its part, Honor went further and unveiled the name of its next flagship: the Honor Magic 3. After the recently announced Honor 50 (the company’s first phone to be marketed with Google Mobile Services in the West for several years) ), it’s supposed to be Honor’s first foldable phone because it uses the Magic range for experimental form factors.
What are the specifications of the Snapdragon 888 Plus?
Like previous “Plus” versions of Qualcomm’s chipsets, the 888 Plus uses essentially the same 5nm hardware as the Snapdragon 888, but has increased the processor and AI cores to improve performance.
The Kryo 680 processor is back, but the Cortex-X1 main core is now at 2995 GHz (which Qualcomm rounds up to 3 GHz), up from 2.84 GHz for the previous generation.
For its part, the artificial intelligence engine has received an even bigger boost, with an improvement of around 20% over the 888. It now offers 32 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), against 26 TOPS Six months ago.
All other chip specifications remain unchanged, from the Adreno 660 GPU to the on-chip Snapdragon X60 5G modem. Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and Qualcomm Quick Charge 5 also remain, as do the chip’s camera capabilities.
Here are the main specifications:
- 5 nm architecture
- Integrated Snapdragon X60 5G modem, downlink up to 7.5 Gbps
- Kryo 680 processor, 2.995 GHz hasta
- Adreno 660 GPU, supports up to QHD + @ 144Hz
- Hexagon 780 AI processor, 32 TOPS
- ISP Spectra 580, up to 2.7 gigapixels per second
- Hasta 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM
- Qualcomm 5 Quick Charge
Are there references for the 888+?
While Qualcomm hasn’t released any official benchmarking for the 888 Plus, a pre-launch leak gave us an unofficial look at how the chip performed in Geekbench 5, and more importantly, it included the main 3 GHz chip, it therefore seems that is legitimate.
However, the actual score of the reference shows a fairly modest jump. The multi-core score of 3,704 is higher than the average we’ve seen for 888 phones, but it’s actually lower than the best numbers we’ve seen – the Vivo X60 Pro + scored 3,781 when we tested it.
Of course, RAM and other factors contribute to the score, so overall the 888+ is likely to outperform the 888 in terms of base performance, but don’t expect a big jump.
What about the Snapdragon 888 Pro, 888 4G and 888 wifi?
Before the 888 Plus was announced, we had heard conflicting names for Qualcomm’s next chip.
On the one hand, the first leaks concerned the 888 Pro and not the 888 Plus. Most likely, these are different possible names for the same chip, but the Pro may be a different chip.
The first time we heard the Snapdragon 888 Pro name was thanks to informant Digital Chat Station, who shared the news of the 888 Pro’s existence via Weibo (machine translated via Twitter):
#DigitalChatStation
Domestic manufacturers of s888 pro are also testing, q3 will have models and might not be overseas exclusive like last year. Is it the super-large nuclear booster x1 or the improvement of the process?– Digital chat station (@chat_station)
April 24, 2021
Since then, there has been talk (from the same source) of a Snapdragon 888 WiFi and a Snapdragon 888 4G on hold.
These two could be specifically targeted at Huawei. The company’s inclusion in a U.S. commercial blacklist prohibits it from purchasing 5G technology from U.S. manufacturers, but it is allowed certain 4G and Wi-Fi components.
This means that if Qualcomm made a Snapdragon 888 4G, Huawei could theoretically use it to power the upcoming P50 series, which is expected to be unveiled in full this summer.
Original article published in English on our sister site TechAdvisor.
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