Qualcomm makes its flagship chip a bit better

Just when you thought the Snapdragon 855 was as good as it gets, Qualcomm has only gone and put a plus on the end of it.

As its name implies, the Snapdragon 855 Plus is a bit better than the Snapdragon 855 chip, which Qualcomm launched amid much fanfare in Hawaii late last year. The marketing top-line for this launch is that it’s all about mobile gaming, with both the CPU and GPU being a bit faster than in the boring old vanilla 855. As with its predecessor the 855 Plus also plays nice with the 5G X50 modem.

“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,” said Kedar Kondap, VP of product management at Qualcomm. “Snapdragon 855 Plus is our most advanced mobile platform to date and will build upon the success of the 2019 Android flagship Snapdragon 855 5G mobile platform.”

Apart from the faster processors there is talk of something called the Snapdragon Elite Gaming Experience, which includes the Vulkan 1.1 Graphics Driver, which Qualcomm compares favourably to Open GL ES and the ‘Game Jank Reducer’, a must-have for anyone whose game jank has reached troublesome levels. As if that’s not enough this SoC features the fourth generation of Qualcomm’s AI engine and some VR/AR features.