The first major announcement at the MWC 2021 was from Qualcomm. Perhaps, I am talking about the newly announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus (Snapdragon 888+) which is an overclocked version of the standard Snapdragon 888 SoC that comes with improved CPU and GPU performance among others. Here’s everything you need to know about the new Snapdragon 888 Plus.
The chipset built on a 5nm node has received a big core with ARM Cortex-X1 variety that has a clock speed of 2.995GHz (or almost 3GHz) and it is a Prime core. The new chipset offers 32TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) with its sixth-gen Hexagon 780 AI processor. To put things into perspective, the previous SD888 scores 26TOPS which shows a major improvement. Apart from this, the rest of everything remains almost the same such as the Snapdragon X60 5G modem sport that has a 7.5Gbps top DL speed, Adreno 660 GPU, Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 that supports Wi-Fi 6E with 2.4Ghz, 5GHz, and 6GHz among others.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus’s X60 5G modem supports 5G mmWave and sub-6 GHz with global 5G multi-SIM. The new chipset supports Bluetooth v5.2 with LE among other features. SD888+ sports NavIC, GPS, GNSS, QZSS, SBAS, Beidou, Glonass, dual-frequency GNSS, and Galileo among others.
Qualcomm Spectra 580 ISP embedded in the new chipset offers up to 200MP camera setup (single-cam) and goes up to 28MP on a triple camera with MFNR, ZSL, 30fps support. There’s slow-motion video capture support of up to 720p@960fps and up to 8K video recording at 30fps as well as 4K HDR with computational HDR video capture.
Moving on, the chipset supports displays at 4K@60Hz, QHD+@144Hz as well as up to 10-bit of color depth; HDR10+, HLG, HDR10, and Dolby Vision. It supports face, voice, iris, and fingerprint biometric authentication systems.
Currently, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Motorola have already confirmed that they will launch smartphones using the Snapdragon 888 Plus chipsets and some could arrive as early as Q3 2021. Other OEMs will join the wagon too.
