Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 855 Plus: A Higher Bin SKU
Today Qualcomm is announcing a new small refresh of the Snapdragon 855 SoC: the new Snapdragon 855+. In the past Qualcomm had the habit of sometimes refreshing their flagship SoCs in the middle of their product life and give them a small performance boost, probably the most known chip fitting this pattern was the Snapdragon 821 from a few years ago. The S835 never got an upgrade, however the S845 last year did get a higher bin variant which ended up in a few vendor's products, including the renamed Snapdragon 850 product that featured the same specifications.
| Qualcomm Snapdragon Flagship SoCs 2019 | ||
| SoC | Snapdragon 855 | Snapdragon 855+ |
| CPU | 1x Kryo 485 Gold (A76 derivative) @ 2.84GHz 1x512KB pL2 3x Kryo 485 Gold (A76 derivative) @ 2.42GHz 3x256KB pL2 4x Kryo 485 Silver (A55 derivative) @ 1.80GHz 4x128KB pL2 2MB sL3 | 1x Kryo 485 Gold (A76 derivative) @ 2.96GHz 1x512KB pL2 3x Kryo 485 Gold (A76 derivative) @ 2.42GHz 3x256KB pL2 4x Kryo 485 Silver (A55 derivative) @ 1.80GHz 4x128KB pL2 2MB sL3 |
| GPU | Adreno 640 @ 585MHz | Adreno 640 @ ~672MHz |
| Memory | 4x 16-bit CH @ 2133MHz LPDDR4x 34.1GB/s 3MB system level cache | |
| ISP/Camera | Dual 14-bit Spectra 380 ISP 1x 48MP or 2x 22MP | |
| Encode/ Decode | 2160p60 10-bit H.265 HDR10, HDR10+, HLG 720p480 | |
| Integrated Modem | Snapdragon X24 LTE (Category 20) DL = 2000Mbps 7x20MHz CA, 256-QAM, 4x4 UL = 316Mbps 3x20MHz CA, 256-QAM | |
| Mfc. Process | 7nm (N7) |
The new Snapdragon 855+ today closely follows this pattern: It's overall the same SoC as the Snapdragon 855, however Qualcomm is raising the clocks of the Prime CPU core from 2.84GHz to up to 2.96GHz, giving a 4.2% boost for single-threaded workloads.
Along the CPU boost, we also find that the GPU is receiving a larger 15% performance boost. As the Adreno 640 in the 855 was clocked in at 585MHz, the clock on the 855+ has to be around the 672MHz mark, which is an oddly familiar frequency of Adreno GPUs.
Qualcomm states that we should expect hearing about vendor devices using the new Snapdragon 855+ in the next few weeks. Last year, ASUS was the first vendor to announce the ROG Phone using a higher binned S845 around the same summer time-period, and now the company has confirmed that the ROG Phone II will be also the first to use the new S855+.
I'm also guessing that it's possible that Samsung's upcoming Note10 to be powered by the S855+ as I'm expecting the phone to come with a new Exynos chipset this time around, and the Snapdragon counterpart getting a small boost as well would also make sense.
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