Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ Encounters Heat Problem Amid Clock Speed Boost

The Snapdragon 888 promises top performance, but it can also overheat. For Qualcomm, this is no reason not to give the top CPU a clock frequency refresh with a plus in its name. However, there are no signs of a solution to the heat throttling in the Snapdragon 888+.

Snapdragon 888+ refreshed

In the upper device classes, smartphone manufacturers want to use a CPU that is known to potential buyers as powerful, if only because of the official datasheet. The current Qualcomm top-of-the-range CPU also requires manufacturers to take a special approach to cooling, as the processor tends to throttle when it is used for a long time. This is the reason for the great success of the Snapdragon 870, which with its slightly reduced performance data requires significantly less waste heat management. But Qualcomm knows that manufacturers will still warm to their hearts with a new offer over the Snapdragon 888.

And so you are now taking on the flagship model with a revised version, in which the clock rate increases, but nothing else is actually adapted to the hardware components of the CPU. The Snapdragon 888+ raises the clock frequency to 2.995 GHz – Qualcomm rounds up to 3GHz in its marketing material. The predecessor still had 2.84 GHz here. The top core Cortex-X1, three Cortex-A78 for demanding tasks, and four Cortex-A55 cores for simple work are still responsible for the performance.

The Qualcomm Hexagon 780 AI chip should then offer around 20 percent more performance than its predecessor. The SoC also includes well-known special components for image processing, mobile connections, and the Adreno 660 GPU. All of this makes the chip the “most powerful platform” currently on offer, according to Qualcomm. The question of whether the developers were able to make progress in throttling performance through overheating compared to the predecessor remains open to the idea.

Many manufacturers on board

The time until an answer remains manageable: As expected, Qualcomm already has many partners on board who want to use the Snapdragon 888+ in their top models. ROG, Honor, Motorola, Vivo, and Xiaomi are known. The first devices are expected to be presented in the third quarter of 2021.