Qualcomm has announced a new mobile processor: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870, a successor to last year’s Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus models. To be clear, the 870 is not a new design of the next generation – the title goes to the Snapdragon 888, which significantly improves performance and new features.
The 870, on the other hand, is virtually identical to the 865 and 865 Plus, with the same design up to the Kryo 585 CPU and Adreno 650 GPU cores. The 870 is clocked at 3.2 GHz, which makes it about 10 percent faster than the original 865s 2.84 GHz and about 3 percent faster than the 865 Plus (which offered 3.1 GHz speeds). Think of it almost like a Snapdragon 865 Plus-plus.
Qualcomm says that the reason for the new chip responds to the demands of the manufacturer and the market. The 870 is designed for businesses that want to offer the best level processor, but who do not need the best features that the flagship Snapdragon 888 offers, and the higher price it needs. Instead, the company says it expects Snapdragon 870 phones to fetch a price tag of less than $ 800 (though we’ve already seen it confusingly that Snapdragon 888 phones like the $ 799 Galaxy S21 start to bloom in that range).
There’s presumably a marketing aspect here as well: the Snapdragon 870’s new brand and modest (if still real) speed improvements over even the Snapdragon 865 Plus mean that businesses that use the chip in their phones have a ‘new’ 2021- get chip to brag about specifications sheets, without getting the concern looked at by customers because they have an ‘outdated’ or ‘old’ processor like the 865 or 865 Plus.
Qualcomm says the first Snapdragon 870 phones would be available in the first quarter of this year, with Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo and Xiaomi among the list of manufacturers planning to use the new processor in their devices.