Snapdragon 888 has been Qualcomm’s most powerful chipset for smartphones till date but it seems an updated variant of the processor is in tow and one of the first companies to feature the updated chipset could be Honor.
While we still await the proliferation of the new Qualcomm flagship SoC, a rumour has emerged concerning the Snapdragon 888 Plus. According to prolific tipster Digital Chat Station, Qualcomm will release the Snapdragon 888+ in the second half of next year. He also disclosed reason why Qualcomm locked the GPU frequency of the chipset at 840MHz. This he says is to prevent OEMs from secretly overclocking the chip on their devices.
Ever since Huawei sold off the Honor brand, the company has been cleared to work with Qualcomm again and we already know that the brand is working on the Honor 50 Pro+ that is to be powered by the Snapdragon 888 SoC. According to leaker Digital Chat Station, Honor will be one of the OEMs to equip a flagship with the updated chipset. This Plus (or Pro) variant is expected to be launched with a slight bump in performance as seen in the case of variants of the Snapdragon 855 and 865.
According to the leaker, the Snapdragon 888 Plus (or Pro), is already being tested by manufacturers and we may see devices with the updated chipset as soon as Q3. This Plus (or Pro) variant is expected to have a small update in performance as was the case with the revision variants of the Snapdragon 855 and 865.
Until then, Honor is expected to unveil the 50 series in May and the high-end model will be the Honor 50 Pro+. Remember, this one is expected to arrive with the Snapdragon 888 SoC. It was previously reported that Honor expects to revive the Magic lineup to compete with Huawei’s P and Mate series flagships.
If previous ‘Plus’ SoCs are anything to go by, then the Snapdragon 888 Plus will feature overclocked CPU and GPU cores compared to the current Snapdragon 888. The new chipset could also feature a higher binned process thus outputting more power while using less energy. We imagine that Qualcomm will bundle other minor changes too, as it did with the Snapdragon 865 Plus compared to the Snapdragon 865.
It is unclear what smartphone Honor has up its sleeve, although it could be a variant of the rumoured 50 Pro+. The Honor P50 Pro+ was leaked a few days ago through Master Lu benchmarks that said the smartphone will come with a 6.79” AMOLED display with 1440p+ resolution and 120Hz refresh rate along with HDR10+ support. It will run the Magic UI 4.0 software but it’s not known as of now whether it will have Google services or not.
This leak contradicts the leak by Digital Chat Station as it says the smartphone will draw power from Snapdragon 888 paired with LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage. For the optics, the rear camera will include a 50MP main, 13MP ultrawide and 8MP telephoto (50 mm, or 2x magnification) module. There will be a 3D ToF sensor onboard as well. On the front, you should get a 32MP + 8MP combination of sensors. The 4,400 mAh battery will support 66W wired and 50W wireless charging.
