Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ fails to impress in its first Geekbench showing

Rumours about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ have been few and far between. A report from earlier told us that Qualcomm could unveil the SoC sometime in H2, 2021, but nothing more. That could very well be true, as the Snapdragon 888+ just showed up on Geekbench.

Twitter user Abhishek Yadav stumbled upon the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ on the benchmarking platform. It bears the same codename as its non-Plus sibling (Lahaina) and manages to net a single-core score of 1,110 and a multi-core score of 3,587. These numbers are somewhat underwhelming, especially in the single-core department. That, however, could be due to the device in question being an engineering sample.

We know the chipset in question is a Snapdragon 888+ is due to its Cortex-X1 core. It is clocked at 3.0GHz (as opposed to 2.8GHz on the Snapdragon 888). The remaining Cortex-A78 and A55 cores are clocked at 2.42GHz and 1.8GHz, respectively. 'Plus' variants of Qualcomm chipsets only overclock the prime core, effectively confirming that the SoC is the Snapdragon 888+.

We learned some time ago that Qualcomm tasked TSMC with manufacturing some of its 5nm and 6nm parts. That begs the question: is TSMC going to make the Snapdragon 888+ SoC? The chances of that happening are somewhat low, considering that Apple has booked the lion's share of TSMC's 5nm capacity.

Then again, only a handful of smartphones used the Snapdragon 865+ chipset last year. That number will only reduce this time because many OEMs that used the chipset in 2020 have already launched a Snapdragon 888-powered device.

The ASUS ROG Phone 3, for example, ran the Snapdragon 865+. Its successor, the ROG Phone 5, is already out and about with a Snapdragon 888, and a Snapdragon 888+ refresh seems very unlikely. Another big player, Samsung, is out of the equation, as the company has no plans to launch a Galaxy Note phone this year.

We could still see the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ on the Galaxy Z Fold 3, though. Other takers could include OnePlus and Chinese OEMs with a penchant for launching a new smartphone every week.

Buy the Snapdragon 888-powered Samsung Galaxy S21+ on Amazon