Qualcomm Launches New Snapdragon 865 Plus High-end SoC

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 865 Plus, a new system on a chip (SoC) for the high-end segment of the smartphone market. The manufacturer promises a performance increase of almost 10 percent, especially for the gaming and artificial intelligence sectors.

Focus on higher CPU and GPU performance

The “Snapdragon 865 Plus 5G Mobile Platform” from Qualcomm is a slightly boring version of the Snapdragon 865 SoC, which is used this year in many high-end smartphones with the Android operating system. In direct comparison with its current flagship, Qualcomm has given the 865 Plus three improvements:

• The new SoC’s Cryo 585 CPU can achieve a maximum clock frequency of 3.1 gigahertz, which exceeds the maximum clock rate of the well-known 865 SoC by 10 percent.
• The Adreno 650 graphics unit integrated in the Snapdragon 865 Plus also calculates 10 percent faster than that in the older 865
• Support for Qualcomm’s FastConnect 6900 has been added. This is a new connectivity system that offers, among other things, Wi-Fi 6E connections with a speed of up to 3.6 gigabits per second and Bluetooth 5.2.

The list of innovations quickly makes it clear that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 Plus is pursuing a strategy comparable to that of the Snapdragon 855 Plus last year. In the middle of the year, a high-end SoC with a slightly increased CPU and GPU performance should arouse interest among manufacturers who really want to get the absolute best performance out of the chip design that is currently available. A smartphone that is particularly well suited for gaming could be the result of these considerations, for example. However, the Snapdragon X55 mobile modem is still not part of the SoC in the 865 Plus but still has to be installed as a separate component in the smartphone. So improvements in energy efficiency are not expected from the new chipset.

Availability from quarter 3 2020

The first devices that will be equipped with the Snapdragon 865 Plus are, according to Qualcomm, the ROG Phone III from Asus and a previously unofficial premium smartphone from Lenovo with Legion branding. In both cases, these are actually products that want to stand out as a platform for mobile gaming. This is comparable to devices like the Asus ROG Phone II or the Nubia Red Magic 3 from the previous year, in which the 855 Plus is. However, with the OnePlus 7T Pro there was also a mainstream smartphone that relied on the Plus version of the 855. It remains to be seen how other manufacturers will react to the Snapdragon 865 Plus.

According to Qualcomm, the first smartphones with Snapdragon 865 Plus will appear on the market from the third quarter of 2020.