El Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 de It is currently Qualcomm's most advanced bet for the high-end smartphone sector. This chipset is one of the newest from the American semiconductor manufacturer and was launched in December last year as a 5-nanometer node-size System-on-Chip (SoC).
Since the Snapdragon 855, the mobile platform that we find under the hood in the 2018 flagships, the manufacturer has offered a Plus version of its most powerful processors. The same happened, consequently, with the Snapdragon 865, which became official in December 2019 and got its Plus variant in July 2020. Now, another that will receive an advanced version is the Snapdragon 888, a piece that was presented at the beginning of last month.
The Snapdragon 888 Plus will be released in the second quarter of 2021
As has happened with the Plus versions of Qualcomm's most advanced SoCs, The Snapdragon 888 Plus will be officially unveiled and launched in the second friendship of the year. This is indicated by the prolific tipster Digital Chat Station in one of his most recent reports.
Recall that the improved variants of Qualcomm's flagship mobile platforms are nothing more than the same chipsets already presented with slight modifications that increase the clock frequency at which they work. That is, the manufacturer performs a overclocking in these parts so that, in this way, they offer superior performance, without reducing the size of its nodes or making major modifications to components such as the ISP, for example.
Digital Chat Station also revealed the reason why Qualcomm locked the chipset's GPU clock at a maximum clock rate of 840 MHz. This, it highlights in its report, was done by the manufacturer to prevent original equipment manufacturers (OEM's) from carrying out a overclocking secretly on the chip of its high-performance devices, a move highly suspected by the company.
The Snapdragon 888 Plus will be released in the second half of 2021, says Digital Chat Station
By way of review, the Snapdragon 888 already present in mobiles like the Xiaomi Mi 11 features up to 25% higher performance and energy efficiency, compared to other predecessor Qualcomm chipsets. This is also due to the core configuration that the CPU boasts, which is divided into three clusters and is as follows:
- A Cortex X1 core clocked at 2.84 GHz and 1 MB of L2 cache.
- Three Cortex A78 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz with 512 KB of L2 cache (for each).
- Quad Cortex A55 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz with 128 KB of L2 cache (for each).
It also has 4 MB of shared L3 cache, apart from the processor's own 3 MB of cache that is dedicated exclusively to the system. On the other hand, with respect to GPU Adreno 660 carrying, Qualcomm says that It is up to 35% faster than GPUs from predecessor SoCs and consumes 20% less power.
Of course, the new Snapdragon 888 comes with an integrated 5G modem, so every smartphone that carries it will be compatible with 5G networks globally. The Snapdragon X60 5G is the modem chosen for such a task. There are also other advanced and available connectivity alternatives such as Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.
The AI engine of the Snapdragon 888 is named Hexagon 780, and it is the component in charge of helping to move smoothly all the tasks and processes related to Artificial Intelligence, renderings and more.
In the gaming section, there is compatibility with high refresh rates of up to 144 Hz, something especially important for battle royale games. This component is key to performance as it can process up to 26 tera operations per second. In turn, the Snapdragon 888 also has its own security processor that, according to Qualcomm itself, will be monitoring privacy and security at all times, in order to offer extreme encryption for user safety.