Qualcomm launches new Snapdragon 870 5G, a boosted version of previous years Snapdragon 865

For the first time, Qualcomm has launched multiple lineups in their flagship 800 series, earlier they used to launch a flagship 800 chip along with a boosted “plus” variant later. Qualcomm has announced a new mobile phone processor: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870, a successor to last year’s flagship Snapdragon 865 and 865 + models. But it’s not the new flagship of the series, that title still goes to Snapdragon 888, which is far more superior to it in terms of performance and new features.

The Snapdragon 870 on the other hand is identical to the 865 & 865+, with the same design right down to the Kryo 585 CPU and Adreno 650 GPU cores. The 870 is clocked at 3.2GHz, however, making it about 10 percent faster than the original 865’s 2.84GHz and about 3 percent faster than the 865 Plus which offered 3.1GHz speeds. The new Snapdragon 870 is designed to deliver increased performance across the board for geared-up gameplay with insanely fast Qualcomm® Snapdragon Elite Gaming™ experiences, truly global 5G sub-6 GHz and mmWave, and ultra-intuitive AI.

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The Adreno 650 GPU makes its return, but it’s not clear if it received a clock boost of its own and, if not, whether it’s running at the 865 frequency (587 MHz) or 865+ (670 MHz). The Hexagon 698 and the Tensor Accelerator deliver the same 15 TOPS as the two 865 chips so that did not get a boost.

The display driver can run 1440p class panels at up to 144Hz (or 4K at 60 Hz) and supports HDR10+ (Rec. 2020 colour gamut). The Spectra 480 ISP is unchanged as well, with support for sensors up to 200 MP, 8K video capture at 30 fps (and 4K at 120 fps), high dynamic range videos using the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision standards.

There’s no onboard 5G modem, instead, the chipset will be paired with an external Snapdragon X55 with sub-6 and mmWave support (up to 7.5 Gbps downlink speeds).

Qualcomm says that the first Snapdragon 870 phones should be available in Q1 of this year, with Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, and Xiaomi among the list of manufacturers planning to use the new processor in their devices.

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