Earlier today San Diego chip giant Qualcomm announced an upgrade to its Snapdragon 855. Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 855 in Huawei last year and the SoC focuses on neural and image signal processing by increasing die area for these calculations. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus announced today is focused for gaming devices, as the company has raised clock speeds for the chip's GPU and CPU. Now, we can confirm that the first gaming smartphone with the Snapdragon 855+ will be ASUS' ROG Phone II. Take a look below for more details.
ASUS ROG Phone II Will Run On Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC Confirms Company
With TSMC decreasing semiconductor feature size on a yearly basis, high-end smartphone processors are capable of performing heavy-duty computations at acceptable power levels. This capability has led to the creation of a brand-new niche of flagship smartphones that are customized for gaming. We've been lucky to get our hands on Razer's entry in this niche - the Razer Phone and Razer Phone 2.
Today, ASUS has followed up with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus and announced that its upcoming gaming phone under the Republic of Gamers brand will be the first gadget to feature the new chipset. ASUS' ROG initially consisted of products targetted towards PC gaming, but the company expanded the brand to include gaming smartphones in 2018.
The device with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus will be dubbed as the ROG Phone II, and ASUS' hasn't shared any other details for the device. According to Qualcomm, devices with the new Snapdragon will become commercial in the second half of this year, which started this July. The Snapdragon 855 Plus' one Kryo Gold 485 core based on ARM's Cortex A76 is clocked at 2.96GHz, which is a 4.2% increase over the regular Snapdragon 855. The new SoC's Adreno 640 GPU is 15% faster than its predecessor as it's clocked at 672MHz.
ASUS' original ROG Phone is optimized for heat dissipation. The device dissipates heat through a copper heatsink and can even accommodate a cooling fan - which is a first of its kind for a mobile gadget. It also features a special binned Snapdragon 845 for optimum heavy workload performance. Now, with the Snapdragon 855 Plus, Qualcomm's simply decided to make this particular CPU configuration commercial, so that other manufacturers can also use it.
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