Qualcomm usually announces its flagship chipset in December and it is followed by a ‘Plus’ variant in the second half of next year. It seems like the company will be continuing this process in 2021 as well. The Snapdragon 888 chipset was launched in December 2020 with the launch of Xiaomi Mi 11 5G. Now, an enhanced version of the Mobile Platform with the moniker Snapdragon 888+ is said to be in the works. The new SoC is said to have appeared on the Geekbench benchmarking platform (via Abhishek Yadav).
For reference, the Snapdragon 888 Mobile Platform’s codename is Lahaina. The new SoC that has appeared on Geekbench has the same codename, which indicates that it is a new variant of the already-present flagship chipset. As for the specifications, the upcoming SoC includes four low-power cores working at 1.80GHz, three Cortex-A78 clusters working at 2.42GHz, and a performance core that offers clocking speeds of 3.0GHz.
By contrast, the Snapdragon 888 SoC offers a 2.84GHz performance core. Therefore, it is tipped that this is a new chipset with the moniker Snapdragon 888+ or Snapdragon 888 Pro. It will be arriving as an enhanced version of the existing flagship Qualcomm SoC.
The testing device that appeared on the benchmarking platform uses the Snapdragon 888+ Mobile Platform with 6GB of RAM. Further, it runs Android 11 OS. It scored 1171 and 3704 points in the single-core and multi-core tests of Geekbench, respectively. Plus, according to Chinese tipster Digital Chat Station’s recent Weibo post, Qualcomm might have three variants of the Snapdragon 888 SoC. These are Snapdragon 888 4G, Snapdragon 888 Wi-Fi, and Snapdragon 888 Pro.
We will have to wait and see if this is indeed the Plus variant of the current Qualcomm flagship SoC. If it is, we could expect some new devices in the second half of the year featuring this chipset.