Qualcomm Repackages Last Year’s Flagship SoC As “Snapdragon 870”

Qualcomm repackages a chip from last year in the “Snapdragon 870”. Last year’s flagship SoC was the Snapdragon 865, and then Qualcomm released the slightly increased Snapdragon 865+. The Snapdragon 870 appears to be an 865 ++. It’s another stroke of the clock.

Qualcomm has a totally impenetrable product line, so it’s unclear whether a single non-flagship SoC ad from the company is meaningful. It looks like this chip will be picked up by some of the more interesting Android OEMs though. The press release says it will “power a selection of flagship devices from key customers, including Motorola, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO and Xiaomi.” The real flagship SoC is the Snapdragon 888, so Qualcomm’s use of the “flagship” here definitely belongs to scary quotes.

Like the 865, it is an eight-core 7nm chip. The Prime Cortex A77 core is now clocked at 3.2GHz and keeps your benchmark apps as it’s 3% faster than the 3.1GHz Snapdragon 865+! Qualcomm isn’t saying anything, so we’ll assume all other cores are the same as the Snapdragon 865. That means three more A77 cores at 2.4 GHz and four A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. Like the 865+, it seems there’s always the option for Qualcomm’s latest connectivity chip, giving you the option of an 870 with Wi-Fi 6E.

The Snapdragon 870 isn’t just similar in spec to the 865 – Qualcomm describes it as “building on the success of the Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus”, indicating that this is another clock bump without design change. Data sheets 865+ and 870 are also identical. If it’s the exact same chip, it’s a strange decision because the design of the Snapdragon 865 SoC was an interim design. It was created to ship 5G to consumers as quickly as possible, and it comes with the 4G / 5G modem on a separate chip. Given that the 865 was a large and expensive two-chip solution, you’d think Qualcomm would want to let it die as quickly as possible. If we assume the previous generation chips are dead, the 870 is now the only chip in Qualcomm’s modern lineup to have a 4G and 5G modem on a separate chip. Every Qualcomm smartphone SoC more expensive than this one has a built-in 4G / 5G modem, and every SoC cheaper than this one has a built-in modem. Heck, the 5G on board now goes all the way to the Snapdragon 4 series.

The upcoming OnePlus 9 Lite, a phone that would be behind the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro, was supposed to come with the Snapdragon 865, but now there’s some speculation that it will come with this “Snapdragon 870” instead. In the land of marketing logic, I guess Qualcomm’s new model number will prevent casual observers from calling this “last year’s chip.” Unfortunately for Qualcomm, marketing has no power here.

As for the timing, Qualcomm says that “commercial devices based on Snapdragon 870 are expected to be announced in the first quarter of 2021”.