Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 888 Plus smartphone processor on Monday with an improved clock speed of 3 GHz. The announcement came as part of a virtual MWC appearance.
That’s up from 2.84 GHz in the Snapdragon 888 which arrived in early 2021 in several Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S21.
The Plus version is expected to ship in phones in the third quarter, which technically starts Thursday, July 1. Qualcomm named Xiaomi, vivo, Motorola and HONOR, maker of the upcoming Magic3 series, as customers.
The clock speed improvement is expected to help with streaming video and game-playing, yet one big boost will be AI processing, up by 20% for video calls and more. More than 130 phone models will use the Snapdragon 888 and 888 Plus, the chipmaker said.
In specifications for its Snapdragon 888 Plus 5G Mobile platform, Qualcomm said the AI elements will include an Adreno 660 GPU, a Kryo 680 CPU, a Hexagon 780 processor and three fused accelerators.
A portion of a virtual Qualcomm keynote by incoming CEO Cristian Amon was devoted to ways to use 5G in other devices than phones, such as cars and industrial settings where faster speeds and lower latency than 4G will matter.
In one example, Qualcomm shared an illustration of how a factory floor can be connected with 5G for precise positioning of machines connected to a multi-access edge computing (MEC) core:
