Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC For Gaming Smartphones
American chipmaker Qualcomm launched its latest flagship mobile processor, the Snapdragon 855 SoC; last year in the month of December. The chipset has since been seen in most Android flagship smartphones this year including the OnePlus 7, OnePlus 7 Pro, Asus 6Z, Nubia Red Magic 3 and the Redmi K20 Pro. Now, in a bid to capture the ever increasing gaming trend in mobile devices, the company has announced the Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC. It offers slight upgrades in the CPU and GPU of the chipset which should offer a better gaming experience.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus as the name suggests, is a slightly tuned version of the Snapdragon 855 SoC. While not a successor, the newest chipset is specifically designed for gaming smartphones to offer better performance. In terms of the difference between the chipsets, the major change in the latest mobile processor is that is bumps up the Prime CPU core clock speed up to 2.96GHz. This is a significant increase from the 2.84GHz clock speed on the Prime core of the previous version. Apart from the CPU, the Adreno 640 GPU on the new Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC boasts of a 15 percent performance increase over the GPU in the Snapdragon 855. Other than the aforementioned differences, other specifications of the two chipsets remain the same.
Snapdragon 855
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While the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus is the newest offering by the company; it isn’t expected to totally replace the Snapdragon 855 in most of the flagship smartphones launching this year. This is because of the performance increase in the newest chipset will mean that it will generate more heat. Other than gaming handsets, the cooling solutions on most flagship devices may not be suited to handle the amount of heat generated on the peak load of the processor. Furthermore, Taiwanese electronics giant Asus has already announced that its next gaming smartphone, the ROG Phone 2, will be the first in the world to feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC. The device will launch on the 23rd of July, so we don’t have to wait long to see the newest chipset in action.
