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OnePlus CEO confirms key OnePlus 8 series specs ahead of launch

By Joshua Swingle

Published: Mar 31, 2020, 11:50 AM

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Android OnePlus

OnePlus CEO confirms key OnePlus 8 series specs ahead of launch

The OnePlus 8

One day after revealing when and how it plans to announce its upcoming flagship lineup, OnePlus has today confirmed several of the key specifications that will be coming to the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 is confirmed

Speaking through the official OnePlus Forum earlier today, CEO Pete Lau reiterated his company’s commitment to providing a “fast and smooth” user experience on all smartphones. This has been at the heart of OnePlus’ efforts since day one and will not be changing anytime soon.

Helping push that strategy forward on the OnePlus 8 series is going to be the 120Hz refresh rate screen technology introduced in January. Rumor has it the feature may be limited to the Pro-branded model, but it will nevertheless be a welcome addition.

Coupled with the revamped screen is going to be OnePlus’ “most powerful setup to date.” It officially consists of the high-end Snapdragon 865 chipset which has recently been used inside the rival Galaxy S20 Ultra and LG V60 ThinQ.

The OnePlus 8

The chipset in question offers a 25% increase in CPU performance when compared to the Snapdragon 855 used inside the OnePlus 7 and 7T. There is also a 25% boost to GPU rendering times and, rather impressively, a 25% increase in energy efficiency.

OnePlus also boasted about the fact that shooting video now eats up 16% less energy and the 40% increase in video noise pixel processing power. The Snapdragon 865’s AI is twice as fast as before too.

UFS 3.0 and LPDDR5 RAM chips

To fully take advantage of the sheer amount of power offered by Qualcomm’s chipset, OnePlus says it has selected faster LPDDR5 RAM chips for its latest smartphones. These consume 45% less power than the previous-gen technology but can transfer up to 51.2GB of data per second, which is pretty incredible.

Additionally, OnePlus has once again committed to implementing UFS 3.0 tech inside the OnePlus 8 series, something that boosts read and write speeds to 1,700MB/s. This, in turn, should make editing videos or photos faster and opening apps a bit quicker.

The OnePlus 8 Pro

OnePlus has built upon these improvements with two new technologies called Turbo Write and Host Performance Booster. The former uses the “upper section of the ROM's storage as a high-speed read/write interval. Here, in theory, each read/write will enter this high-speed buffer, and then proceed to the next command of data transfer.”

The latter, on the other hand, “can further improve the random read performance after extended use.”

Software optimizations and 5G connectivity are also coming

OnePlus hasn’t confirmed any other specifications for the OnePlus 8 series just yet, but it did reiterate its “relentless focus on software optimization” and maximizing the performance of hardware by adding only features that are important to customers.

This is so important to the company, in fact, that it has a specialized R&D team named the “FSE Team,” which stands for Fast, Smooth, Efficient. This group was set up in 2016 with the sole focus of system optimizations.

Another boost coming to the OnePlus 8 series will be 5G network connectivity. The latter ships as standard with the Snapdragon 865 and OnePlus execs have already confirmed the feature won’t be disabled on its upcoming flagships.