For those of you who have been following Qualcomm long enough, this is not the first time that the company decided to announce an updated version of the mobile SoC platform. The Snapdragon 820 was followed by the faster Snapdragon 821, but this time Qualcomm decided to keep the same number and use the Plus as a differentiator.

Qualcomm has a clear vision of a Snapdragon Elite Gaming experience, especially when gaming in the 5G arena. Let's hope that this will become popular sooner rather than later. This announcement can be seen as Snapdragon 712 is a faster version of Snapdragon 710.

“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, vice president, product management,  Qualcomm Technologies. “Snapdragon 855 Plus is our most advanced mobile platform to date and will build upon the success of the 2019 Android flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 5G mobile platform.”

Snapdragon 855 Plus comes with X24 4G LTE integrated modem and matches a Snapdragon X50 5G solution for early adopters.

The Qualcomm Kryo 485 CPU Prime core clock speed goes up to 2.96GHz (Snapdragon 855 stops at 2.84 GHz) while the Qualcomm Adreno 640 GPU offers a 15% increase in performance.

The chip is targeting OEMs focused on the gaming phones, and China OEMs are all over the Snapdragon Elite gaming experience and gaming phones overall. Gaming phones have a market and continue to grow. The new Vulkan 1.1 driver is likely to be 20 percent more power efficient than on Open GL ES. The Snapdragon Elite Gaming Experience also features software enhancements such as Game Jank Reducer, Game Fast Loader, Game Anti-Cheat Extensions, and more.   

The Snapdragon 855 Plus comes with enhanced AI, that continues to ultra-responsive gaming with the 4th generation multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine, which offers a total capacity of more than seven trillion operations per second (7 TOPs), providing a powerful blend of dedicated and programmable AI acceleration. With 15 percent faster GPU, the AI component of the chip will run faster in certain workloads.

Snapdragon 855 Plus will offer better immersive XR (virtual reality/augmented reality) experience especially with XR viewers that connect to a mobile device fueled by the Snapdragon 855 Plus with the 5G X50 modem, able to access blazing-fast, ultra-smooth 5G experiences.

Commercial devices based on Snapdragon 855 Plus are expected to be commercial 2H 2019 but since Asus already announced its 2nd generation gaming phone based on Snapdragon 855 Plus, the launch could not be that far away.

Snapdragon 855 Plus just made a great platform even better, especially for gaming enthusiasts.