Continuing its launch pattern for the past few years, Qualcomm announced its latest flagship SOC under the 800-series today named the Snapdragon 888 Plus. As always, this chipset will power most of the Android flagships that are coming in the 2nd half of this year. So, what’s new with the 888 Plus? First of all, the CPU gets a performance boost as it is now clocked at up to 3.0GHz (2.995GHz to be exact), compared to 2.84GHz in the case of Snapdragon 888. The second major upgrade is in terms of the AI Engine which now offers up to 20% better AI performance over the non-Plus version.
Speaking of the things that remain the same as the Snapdragon 888, there is the same Adreno 660 GPU with no performance boost, the same X60 5G modem, the same ISP, the same camera, and gaming features. So, there are only two major upgrades – CPU & AI Engine. The AI Engine can now deliver up to 32 TOPS performance which is a considerable jump over the 26 TOPS performance of Snapdragon 888’s AI Engine. The CPU architecture has not changed, so the only thing upgraded is that the prime Cortex X1 CPU core is now clocked at 2.995GHz, or 3GHz as Qualcomm is advertising it.
Speaking of the smartphones coming with this new SOC, Honor has officially announced that its Magic 3 smartphone will launch with Snapdragon 888 Plus, making it one of the first phones to launch with this chip. Other brands such as Vivo, Xiaomi, Asus, Oppo, Motorola will also launch their Snapdragon 888 Plus powered phones in the coming months.