Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus Announced With 3GHz CPU, Improved AI Engine at MWC 2021

Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus SoC has been announced for flagship phones at MWC 2021. The new processor is a slight upgrade to the Snapdragon 888 SoC and it offers an increased Qualcomm Kryo 680 CPU Prime core clock speed at up to 3.0 GHz and is equipped with the 6th-generation Qualcomm AI Engine with up to 32 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) AI performance, that the company claims is more than 20 percent improvement. Apart from this, the new Snapdragon 888 Plus SoC is pretty much the same as its sibling that was launched last December, and the new model looks to power new flagships launching in the second half of 2021.

The big difference is that the Snapdragon 888 Plus SoC has a Kryo 680 core clock with the speed boosted to 2.995GHz. The sixth-gen Qualcomm Hexagaon 780 AI processor can now deliver 32 TOPS instead of 26 TOPS on the regular Snapdragon 888 SoC. Apart from this, everything else pretty much remains unchanged. Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus has an Adreno 660 GPU and a Snapdragon X60 5G modem with 7.5 Gbps top DL speed. Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 enables the latest Wi-Fi standards for fast speed download. Qualcomm has announced that commercial handsets based on Snapdragon 888 Plus are expected to be announced in the third quarter of 2021.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 Plus has a Spectra 580 ISP that enables triple concurrent capture with parallel processing at up to 2.7 gigapixels per second. It is able to capture three 28-megapixel photos or three 4K HDR videos at once, capture 120 fps burst photo at 12-megapixel, offer AI-based auto-focus and auto-exposure, and a new low-light architecture that is claimed to help capture brighter photos, even in near-darkness. The chipset also brings 10-bit colour depth in the HEIF format for capturing vivid colours.

Snapdragon 888 Plus supports full suite of Snapdragon Elite Gaming features that include Variable Rate Shading for faster graphics performance and Qualcomm Game Quick Touch for increased display responsiveness. The chipset also offers Quick Charge 5 support that claims to fully charge a phone in less than 15 minutes. Connectivity options include up to Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth v5.2, and NFC. Further, the chipset includes support for GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, NavIC, and SBAS. Snapdragon 888 Plus supports up to 4K display at 60Hz or QHD+ at 144Hz. It also supports HDR and HDR10+ standards.