Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus aims to offer the boost mobiles gamers need

Qualcomm wants to push the limits of its Snapdragon 855 chip to another level before it looks forward to unveiling a newer flagship chip at the end of the year.The company has just taken the wraps off of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus which aims to be nothing more but a minor upgrade to the original Snapdragon 855.According to Qualcomm, the new chip is aimed at delivering better 5G, mixed reality, as well as better AI computing power along with better mobile gaming experience.The chipset brings a few performance tweaks to the Snapdragon 855, and will likely appear in upcoming flagship phones that get released between now and December, which is when Qualcomm is expected to release its next-gen flagship chipset.[caption id="attachment_6998071" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

The Snapdragon 855 Plus chip features a better-tuned Adreno 640 GPU which offers 15% percent performance. Image: Qualcomm[/caption]On the inside, not a lot has changed. The original Snapdragon 855 offered a Kryo 485 CPU with a clock speed of 2.84 GHz, while the Snapdragon 855 Plus steps things up to a so-called Kryo 485 Prime CPU, which offers a clock speed of 2.96 GHz. The Snapdragon 855 Plus also features an Adreno 640 GPU that Qualcomm says has been tuned to offer a 15 percent performance boost over the Adreno 640 GPU on the original Snapdragon 855.This isn’t the first time Qualcomm has released a minor upgrade to a flagship chip before the launch of a natural successor. Back in 2016, the company released the Snapdragon 821 in the month of July, which served as a small upgrade to the Snapdragon 820. The Snapdragon 821, back then offered a 10 percent performance increase over the Snapdragon 820, but otherwise offered similar features.According to Qualcomm, phones with the Snapdragon 855 Plus are expected to ship in the second half of 2019, meaning that phones like the Google Pixel 4 may well ship with the new chip. We might also see companies like OnePlus launch an upgraded version of the OnePlus 7 Pro with the new chip later this year.