In the midst of the ongoing global chip shortage, it's been quite clear that premium products are getting the priority from research and development to the foundry. On that note, Qualcomm has just announced a half-step iteration to its top mobile SoC for 2021, the Snapdragon 888 Plus 5G Mobile Platform.

As with past "Plus" pushes, we're basically looking at gains across the CPU (the eight-core cluster gets a roughly 7% bump to a top clock speed of 2.995GHz) and AI processing (32 trillion operations per second, a 20% jump). The company says that sort of capacity will allow devices to incorporate multiple neural networks simultaneously into tasks such as video calls and software-induced camera bokeh. The raw muscle in this chipset enables 12MP still capture at up to 120fps in a burst. There's also support for 5G downlink at up to 7.5Gbps and Wi-Fi 6E.

Qualcomm boasts that the Snapdragon 888 and 888 Plus are incorporated into 130 product designs that are either out now or are planned for later. Speaking of which, expect new phones to take on the 888 Plus in Q3 from the likes of Motorola, Vivo, and Xiaomi. Honor, recently separated from Huawei, intends on using it for the flagship in its upcoming Magic3 series of devices.