While recent reports suggested that the successor to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will be delayed until the second half of 2022, Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (not 8 Gen 1+) chipset at its launch event in China. The Plus variant of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has been revealed earlier than the previous generation Plus chipset, which usually arrives in late June or early July. So let's take a look at what the new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 has to offer.

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 mobile platform is Qualcomm's attempt to address the shortcomings of the standard 8 Gen 1, offering improved power efficiency while delivering a performance boost. This has been made possible by a simple change. The 8+ Gen 1 is developed on TSMC's 4nm process node as opposed to Samsung's foundry, which was used for the standard 8 Gen 1. This means that we expect most of the user complaints about throttling and thermal issues to be eliminated with this chipset .

Moving on to the specs, let's start with the CPU and GPU. The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 still contains a single Cortex-X2 core, three Cortex A710 cores and four Cortex A510 cores. While the performance and power-saving cores are clocked at the same frequencies, the Cortex-X2 prime core is now clocked at up to 3.2 GHz (as opposed to 3 GHz on the 8 Gen 1). This means you will see a 10% increase in overall performance.

As for the GPU, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 includes the same Adreno 730 GPU. But Qualcomm has managed to boost the GPU clock speed by 10% to deliver even better gaming performance on upcoming flagship Android devices. Also, the company reduced GPU power consumption by 30% compared to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which is amazing. It still supports features like Snapdragon Elite Gaming and HDR gaming.