Qualcomm has announced a mid-year refresh of its flagship Snapdragon 855 chipset. The new Snapdragon 855 Plus is further optimized for gaming, VR, AI, and 5G connectivity. It sticks to the same overall design and chip layout as the 855, but Qualcomm says the Plus’ eight-core Kryo CPU runs at higher peak clock speeds of up to 2.96GHz.

But more important to gamers is a 15 percent performance improvement from the Adreno 640 GPU. That will likely result in the 855 Plus making its way into the next wave of gaming-focused smartphones like those we’ve seen from Asus, Razer, and other companies. As for AI and VR improvements, Qualcomm is continuing to talk up its fourth-generation AI Engine that’s capable of “more than 7 trillion operations per second.”

The Snapdragon 855 Plus will deliver “best-in-class cellular performance, superior coverage and all-day battery life in premium 5G devices,” according to the company. It’s still using two separate modems to get there, however, with both a Snapdragon X24 LTE 4G modem and Qualcomm’s X50 5G modem on board. I guess we won’t see a more efficient approach until the inevitable Snapdragon 865.

The 855, announced late last year, has already led to a generation of premium Android smartphones — such as the Samsung Galaxy S10, OnePlus 7 Pro, and LG G8 — that have felt more responsive and lag-free than ever before. The natural question is whether the 855 Plus will make a noticeable improvement to that speed. We shouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out, with Qualcomm saying the new chipset will debut in consumer devices during the second half of this year. That makes it a prime candidate for inclusion inside Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 or Google’s Pixel 4. Maybe launching so late in the year will pay off for Google this time.