Gaming phones so far have been going through an existential crisis. All of them come with the same flagship processor as every other flagship phone, leading many to question what extra are they getting in exchange for the premium. Now, Qualcomm has announced an overclocked variant of the Snapdragon 855 called the Snapdragon 855 Plus. The upgraded chipset will debut on the upcoming Asus ROG Phone II.
The Snapdragon 855 Plus will offer 15 percent boost in graphics rendering and a CPU that can go as high as 2.96GHz. Presently, the Snapdragon 855 can do 2.84GHz. Qualcomm states the new chip is aimed mostly at gaming phones and devices that will support 5G.
While it remains to be seen whether that has any impact in real-world performance, the fact that it is debuting on the Asus ROG Phone II holds promise. Last year, the ROG Phone introduced a speed-binned Snapdragon 845 that seemingly offered better performance, at least on paper. Asus, however, did not provide any additional details on its upcoming gaming flagship.
Most high-end and flagship Android phones now ship with the Snapdragon 855 that Qualcomm announced last year in December. The Snapdragon 855 is built on a 7nm manufacturing process and features a tri-cluster architecture for the first time. The regular Snapdragon 855 has one prime core clocked at 2.84GHz and three mid-cores clocked at 2.42GHz along with four efficiency cores at 1.8GHz. In the new SoC, the prime core is now clocked at 2.96 Ghz ensuring faster CPU performance. Furthermore, the Adreno 640 GPU on the Snapdragon 855 Plus is also clocked faster, ensuring faster rendering of graphics.
Gaming phones are on the rise and the fact that Qualcomm has come out with a special chipset that offers better performance is a testament to the fact. It remains to be seen, however, how many takers will be there for the overclocked SoC considering there really isn’t anything out there right now that can stress out the regular Snapdragon 855, let alone an overclocked version of it.
