Just in case you missed it, Snapdragon announced a new version of their flagship 855 SoC called the 855 Plus. The new SoC boasts an increased CPU and GPU performance.

In technical terms, this is called a ‘mid-cycle upgrade’, which means is that there aren’t any significant changes, except for a bump in the clock speed to achieve better CPU/GPU performance. In layman terms, they overclocked the 855.

Here’s how they stack up against each other

CPU 

So the way 855’s eight cores were divided was in two sets of four — one set performance-oriented, and the other more power-efficient. On the performance-oriented block, there was one ‘prime’ core running at 2.84 GHz.

The 855+’s ‘prime’ core is bumped up to 2.96 GHz. So now you get one Cortex A76-based core at 2.96GHz in addition to three A76-based cores at 2.42GHz for the performance cluster and four 1.8GHz Cortex A55-based cores for the power cluster.

Hence, in theory, the entire SoC is identical except for the ‘prime’ core, which is now faster. What does this do? Well, with a faster prime core, the SoC can do all those performance-intensive tasks faster, better and in a more stable way. And that’s the CPU boost Qualcomm has been going hard on.

Also read: Snapdragon 855 Plus vs Apple A12 Bionic: Which one’s faster?

GPU

As for the Adreno 640 GPU on the 855, the press release from Qualcomm claims a 15% performance boost.

This performance boost is achieved by repeatedly overclocking the GPU to reach a higher clock speed, starting from the 585 MHz on the 855 to somewhere around 673 MHz on the 855 Plus.

And that’s it. Yes, that’s all that separates these two SoCs.

ASUS will be the first to offer the 855 Plus in their upcoming ROG Phone 2. Samsung is also expected to follow with it’s Galaxy Note 10. Yes, you’ll see faster performance on the 855 Plus, but just how fast that will be, we’re going to have to wait before we find out.

Also read: What is Dedicated GPU? How is it different from Integrated GPU?