The Next Wave of Flagship Phone Chips Is Already Warming Up
A faster Snapdragon 865 refresh and a wider spread of 5G-capable chips look set to reshape flagship and mid-range phones later in 2020.
We’re only a few months into the Snapdragon 865 era, and already the rumor mill has moved on. Samsung’s Galaxy S20 line, the OnePlus 8 series, and a handful of other 2020 flagships are all running the 865 right now, but word is Qualcomm is prepping a “Plus” refresh that pushes clock speeds past 3GHz sometime later this summer. That’s not a huge jump on paper, but it’s the kind of mid-cycle bump we’ve come to expect from Qualcomm — squeeze a bit more headroom out of the same silicon, slap a new badge on it, and let phone makers announce a “new” flagship variant for the back half of the year.
Historically these Plus refreshes show up in a handful of high-profile devices rather than across the whole lineup — think special editions or gaming-focused phones rather than a wholesale replacement of the base chip. If that pattern holds, expect the 865+ to headline a couple of marquee launches rather than get bolted onto everything with a Snapdragon badge.
The bigger story is 5G reaching further down
Honestly, the clock speed bump is the least interesting part of this. What matters more for most buyers is what’s happening below the flagship tier. Through the rest of 2020, expect the number of phones with 5G radios to climb quickly, and not just at the $1000-plus end of the market. Qualcomm and MediaTek are both pushing mid-range 5G chipsets out the door, which is the part of this story that actually changes what a “normal” phone looks like.
Up to now, 5G has mostly been a flagship-only feature — something you got because you were already paying for a top-tier chip, not something built for its own sake. That’s starting to shift. If mid-range Snapdragon and MediaTek silicon with 5G support ships in volume this year, it stops being a premium checkbox and starts being a baseline expectation, the same way LTE eventually did. Carriers clearly want this too — every 5G phone sold is another data point for their network buildout marketing.
What this means if you’re shopping soon
If you’re eyeing a flagship purchase in the next couple of months, the calculus is familiar: buy now and get a proven, well-supported chip, or wait for whatever “Plus” variant shows up and hope it lands in a phone you actually want. My instinct is that the Plus refresh won’t be worth waiting for unless you’re specifically chasing benchmark numbers — real-world performance differences from a few hundred extra megahertz are rarely dramatic.
The 5G expansion is the trend worth actually watching. It’s less flashy than a clock speed headline, but it’s the one that determines whether 5G becomes a mainstream feature by year’s end or stays a premium curiosity. I’ll be keeping an eye on which mid-range phones actually ship with these new chips, and whether carrier coverage keeps pace with the hardware.