On July 15, 2019, Qualcomm announced the launch of the Snapdragon 855 Plus mobile platform. It’s an upgraded product of the flagship platform Snapdragon 855. The latter is adopted by leading OEMs worldwide. Those who want to create outstanding smartphones and provide enhanced performance and support leading multi-gigabit 5G, gaming, AI, and XR experience should put this chip inside their phones. So what about the SND855+? What a segment it is made for? If it’s the top-end niche, it’s also occupied by its founding father. It turns out the performance enhancements mainly refer to gaming and 5G connectivity. The manufacturer claims this SoC will bring the ultimate Qualcomm® SnapdragonTM Elite Gaming experience.
Kedar Kondap, vice president of product management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., said: ‘With the increased CPU and GPU performance, the Snapdragon 855 Plus will bring more powerful gaming devices to elite players. Snapdragon 855 Plus will raise the bar for elite gamers with the increase in CPU and GPU performance and elevate experiences for 5G, gaming, AI and XR, which is something our OEM customers look to us to deliver. Built on the success of the LT 5855 mobile platform as the 2019 Android flagship platform, the Snapdragon 855 Plus is our most advanced mobile platform to date.’
The Snapdragon 855 Plus integrates the Snapdragon X24 LTE 4G modem supporting multi-gigabit connectivity and delivers the best cellular connectivity for top 5G terminals by leveraging the Snapdragon X50 5G modem and Qualcomm Technologies RF front-end solutions. Also, it brings superior network coverage and battery life throughout the day.
Snapdragon 855+ Enhancements
The enhanced performance supported by the platform compared to the Snapdragon 855 includes:
Qualcomm® KryoTM 485 CPU’s super core clocked at up to 2.96GHz
15% performance improvement with Qualcomm® AdrenoTM 640 GPU
The Snapdragon 855+ integrates many of Qualcomm Technologies’ latest technologies and features in gaming, AI and XR. The Snapdragon 855 Plus delivers superior performance for top user experience:
Game: The Snapdragon 855+ can support higher performance and leading gaming experience. With a full suite of hardware and software features optimized for gaming, Snapdragon Elite Gaming is designed to give users a competitive edge, such as support for Vulkan 1.1 graphics drivers, which is up to 20% more efficient than Open GL ES. In addition, Snapdragon Elite Gaming supports software enhancements such as system-level game-cart optimization, game fast load optimization, and game anti-cheat extensions.
AI: The fourth-generation multi-core Qualcomm® artificial intelligence engine delivers a fast-responding gaming experience. It supports more than 7 trillion operations per second (7TOPs) and can be combined to implement proprietary programmable AI acceleration.
XR: By connecting the XR headphone to a mobile terminal equipped with the Snapdragon 855 Plus and Opteron X50 5G modems, users can easily enjoy the immersive XR experience (AR/VR experience) and get a fast, ultra-smooth 5G experience.
Commercial terminals equipped with the Snapdragon 855 Plus are expected to be available in the second half of 2019.