Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus Tipped to Launch in Second Half of 2021

Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus, or Snapdragon 888+, is said to launch in the second half of this year. We are yet to see many smartphones arrive with the Snapdragon 888 — the flagship SoC that launched in December — but reports of its Plus variant have already started. According to the tipsters, we can expect the 888 Plus variant to arrive in the second half of 2021, which makes sense as Qualcomm typically has a mid-year refresh.

So far, the Xiaomi Mi 11 has been launched with Snapdragon 888 and iQoo 7 has been confirmed to debut with the new chipset on January 11. Several other brands have also announced smartphones for 2021 that will have Qualcomm's latest SoC. This includes the Samsung Galaxy S21 and OnePlus 9 series.

As per a Weibo post by tipster Digital Chat Station, Qualcomm will launch the Snapdragon 888 Plus SoC in the second half of 2021. Apart from this, there is no information on the rumoured chipset. The tip seems to be in line with Qualcomm's traditional timeline of launching a mid-year refresher to its SoCs. For instance, the chipmaker announced the Snapdragon 855 Plus in July 2019, as an upgrade to its flagship chipset. The same goes for Snapdragon 865+ launched in July 2020.

The tipster also claims that the US-based chipmaker capped the GPU frequency of the Snapdragon 888 at 840MHz to prevent OEMs from overclocking the chip on their devices. This means that the Snapdragon 888 Plus will likely be a small upgrade over the Snapdragon 888 — just like in the case of Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus. The Snapdragon 865 Plus is claimed to deliver a 10 percent performance boost over the Snapdragon 865. Its Adreno 650 GPU is also only 10 percent faster than the GPU present in the Snapdragon 865, as per Qualcomm.

As mentioned, the Xiaomi Mi 11 is the first smartphone to be launched with the Snapdragon 888 (features and details). And a complete list of smartphones to come with Qualcomm's flagship SoC has been announced.

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