Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 855 Plus will give mobile gamers a boost

Qualcomm’s got a new flagship chip for phones, and it’s not your typical Snapdragon release. 

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus is a (somewhat surprising) mid-year upgrade to the company’s flagship chip, the Snapdragon 855. The performance improvements aren’t huge, and where they do exist, they’ll mostly be of interest to mobile gamers. 

The new chip consists of a slightly overclocked Kryo 485 CPU Prime core, which runs at 2.96GHz — a 4 percent increase over the same chip’s 2.84GHz clock speed in the Snapdragon 855. 

The new Snapdragon 855 Plus chip also has an overclocked Adreno 640 GPU, which, according to Qualcomm, runs 15 percent faster than the one in the Snapdragon 855. 

Finally, the new chip should be better at handling 5G, both in terms of performance and preserving battery life — though I’ve found no difference in specs between the Snapdragon 855 and the 855 Plus. 

The improvements are quite mild and can probably be ignored by most users. They might make a difference in certain type of games which are always hungry for a faster processor. 

In the past year (or two) we’ve seen a rising number of gaming-oriented phones, and the new Snapdragon chip will likely satisfy the demands of that market. For a proper upgrade of the Snapdragon 855, we’ll likely have to wait until the end of the year, which is when Qualcomm typically launches new flagship silicon.