At MWC 2021, Qualcomm has announced its flagship chipset with the new Snapdragon 888 plus. This refreshed flagship chipset’s plus version of Qualcomm for smartphones will support the high end Android based smartphones which will be released in the later half of the year.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset was announced last year in December 2020. The Snapdragon 888 plus recently upgraded by Qualcomm is a pro variant of the same. Qualcomm did some improvements in the CPU and AI capabilities with the Snapdragon 888 plus. The single Cortex-X1 core is now clocked at 2.995 GHz compare to the regular Snapdragon 888 with 2.84 GHz.
The other cores have remained the same. Three high performance Cortex-A78 core at 2.4 GHz and four low power Cortex-A55 core is clocked at 1.8 GHz. Additionally Qualcomm did not update the GPU in this latest variant and continued to offer its same Adreno 660 GPU. But well, inspire of focusing on the GPU improvement, Qualcomm has focused mainly on the Artificial Intelligence related abilities of this new chipset having a different and updated AI engine.
Compared to 26 Tera Operations Per Second on the Snapdragon 888 5G the new 6th Gen Qualcomm AI engine with Hexagon 780 processor offers 20% more improvement which is up to 32 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS). However the Snapdragon 888 plus looks much alike Snapdragon 888 5G which includes the Snapdragon X60 5G modem, maximum 4k display support at 60 Hz and QHD+ at 144 Hz refresh rate and Spectra 580 image signal resolution.
Qualcomm also clarified that the big mobile phone manufacturers like Motorola, Xiaomi, Asus, Vivo and Honor are focusing and working on to launch their devices which would be powered by Snapdragon 888 plus. The devices powered by Snapdragon 888 plus are expected to be out in the market in the second half of the year and most possibly before the fourth quarter.
