Just like last year’s Snapdragon 855 chipset, Qualcomm is giving its 2020 flagship processor, the Snapdragon 865, a mid-cycle refresh. Aptly dubbed Snapdragon 865+, the updated chip naturally features faster performance, and it will debut with two gaming smartphones on 22 July: the Asus ROG Phone 3 and Lenovo Legion.
As expected, the Snapdragon 865+ is very similar to the regular Snapdragon 865; the updated chip features the same CPU and GPU. However, these two components are clocked at a higher frequency in the Snapdragon 865+ to return better performance.
The Kryo 585 CPU cores of the processor, for one, now has a peak clock speed of 3.1GHz; its predecessor maxes out at 2.84GHz. According to Qualcomm, this translates to 10% better CPU performance. As for the chip’s Adreno 650 GPU, it’s said to be 10% faster as well, which suggests that it is also clocked at a higher frequency now.
Basically, the Snapdragon 865+ can be seen as an overclocked version of the regular Snapdragon 865, which is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the latter is a very capable chipset, and the Snapdragon 865+ improves upon that with even faster performance. It’ll be interesting to see if it does bring noticeable performance gain in real life use.
The Asus ROG Phone II
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ will be powering the Asus ROG Phone 3 and Lenovo Legion gaming smartphones, which are (curiously) slated to be launched later this month on the same day on 22 July.