Following last years trend, Qualcomm is expected to refresh its flagship chipset mid-year with a new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus that will offer higher clocks compared to the current Snapdragon 865.
So far, it is believed that the Lenovo Legion gaming phone will be the first phone to feature the new SD865+.
This would be the first phone under the Lenovo brand since 2016, instead they have been producing phones under the Motorola brand which they acquired back in 2014.
Lenovo Legion
The Lenovo Legion is getting a lot of hype and they are big claims with rumoured specifications, including the possibility of a 90W fast charge and Full HD+ OLED display offering 144Hz refresh rate.
There have also been reports of an unusual side pop-up camera.
Lenovo have also launched a teaser poster which confirms the phone should be arriving in July (in China).
Most recently, new benchmarks have been revealed on Antutu which eclipse the current phones topping the charts.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Antutu Benchmarks
What is believed to be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus manages to score 667253 points. Currently the top of the charts shows the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro with 590838 points.
This new score would represent a 12.9% improvement to the existing SD865.
Antutu have separately reported that the OPPO Find X2 Pro is the first to go over the 600k mark with 604123, and even compared to this result, the SD865+ manages to score 10.4% higher.
A breakdown of the score shows the CPU score is 184,973 points while the GPU score is 283,302 points. The memory and UX scores are 112,050 and 86,928 points respectively.
Breakdown of scores
While nearly 13% is a decent performance boost, it is more interesting to see where that total score makes its biggest gains.
For the CPU you are only seeing a moderate 4.4% gain in performance, the big result comes from the GPU with almost 29% gain from the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 865.
| Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus | Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 | % Gain | |
| CPU | 189973 | 182017 | 4.40% |
| GPU | 283302 | 220099 | 28.70% |
| MEM | 112050 | 101961 | 9.90% |
| UX | 86928 | 86752 | 0.20% |
| Total | 667253 | 590838 | 12.90% |
Bigger gains compared to last years SD855 to SD855+ chipset refresh
Looking back at my previous reviews, when you compare the Antutu benchmarks of the SD855 on the OnePlus 7 Pro vs SD855+ on the OnePlus 7T we see:
| Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus | Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 | % Gain | |
| CPU | 141918 | 141289 | 0.40% |
| GPU | 197747 | 178189 | 11.00% |
| MEM | 81017 | 80356 | 0.80% |
| UX | 74583 | 68944 | 8.20% |
| Total | 495274 | 468782 | 5.65% |
Overall
When looking back at what the SD855+ offered over the SD855 it makes me a little sceptical of this new benchmark leak, a 29% improvement on the GPU performance is astronomical for a mid-year refresh.
It could be that Qualcomm is starting to feel the pressure from competing companies though, Mediatek now has a presence in the flagship market, and Samsung is in partnership with AMD to make a mobile Radeon GPU.
True or not, I can’t wait to see what the Lenovo Legion brings to the table.
