Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 Is A Potentially Slightly More Affordable Flagship Chipset

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 is expected to be the go-to chipset of choice for high-end flagship phones of 2021. However, it seems that Qualcomm has introduced another flagship chipset that could be potentially cheaper for manufacturers who can’t or don’t want to pay for the Snapdragon 888.

This comes in the form of the Snapdragon 870, which based on the naming scheme seems like a slight upgrade over 2020’s Snapdragon 865+, which in turn was an upgraded version of the Snapdragon 865. However, apart from the new name, there doesn’t really appear to be that much of a difference from the 865+.

The 870 will still be using the same Adreno 650 GPU and the X55 5G modem. The main change here would be the clockspeed of the Kryo 585 CPU where instead of 3.1GHz in the 865+, it has been bumped up to 3.2GHz, although whether or not users will be able to notice the 100MHz difference remains to be seen.

It seems like a bit of an odd release, but at the same time we can see why. The Snapdragon 888 is built on the 5nm process and is said to be more expensive than previous flagship chipsets. The 870 appears to be built on the 7nm process which will be cheaper, but at the same time offering better performance (even if it’s marginally) than 2020’s flagships.

According to Qualcomm, we can expect devices like OnePlus, Xiaomi, OPPO, Motorola, and iQOO to be taking advantage of this new chipset.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Qualcomm, SoC