We were surprised last year when Qualcomm launched its 2021’s flagship SOC named the Snapdragon 888 instead of Snapdragon 875. Now we know the reason for that as the all-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G chipset is now official. As the names suggest, the Snapdragon 888 is still the best chipset the company makes right now and the Snapdragon 870 sits below the 888 when it comes to overall performance. It is more of an upgrade to the Snapdragon 865+ of last year.
There isn’t a major improvement as most of the things remain the same. There is the same CPU architecture so it uses the Kryo 585 cores but this time, Qualcomm went all out as the Prime Core is clocked at up to 3.2GHz compared to 3.1GHz in the case of Snapdragon 865+. For your information, Snapdragon 865 had the Prime core clocked at up to 2.94GHz. There is the same GPU as in the case of Snapdragon 865+ i.e., Adreno 650.
Unlike the Snapdragon 888 SOC which is built on the 5nm manufacturing process, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 is built on the same 7nm process as the Snapdragon 865/865+. Some other similarities include Hexagon 698 DSP, Spectra 48- ISP, X55 5G Modem, It is weird that while the Snapdragon 865+ had FastConnect 6900 system with support for WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E, Snapdragon 870 comes with FastConnect 6800 so there is support for only WiFi 6 and not WiFi 6E.
On the official website, Qualcomm has shared details of some smartphone brands that will be launching devices with the Snapdragon 870 SOC this year and the list includes brands like OnePlus, Oppo, iQOO, Motorola, Xiaomi, etc.