OnePlus 10 Ultra coming later this year; Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Plus and Marisilicon X NPU in tow

OnePlus went much ahead of its traditional release schedule and brought the OnePlus 10 Pro to the Chinese market earlier this month. Apparently, the company decided to bring a flagship sooner due to the lack of a T-series flagship in the second half of 2021. As you’ve probably noticed, there is still a missing vanilla OnePlus 10 and a OnePlus 10R. These two devices should reach global markets alongside the Pro in March. However, this won’t be the end of the company’s plans for the flagship market. Later in 2022, the company may reveal a new flagship device with beefed specifications and it won’t be part of the T-series. Instead, the new device will carry the OnePlus 10 Ultra moniker.

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Xperia probably was the first smartphone brand to use the “Ultra” suffix for its smartphone. In that case, it came to separate a device with a massive screen from the company’s traditional lineups. However, Samsung was the one that made the “Ultra” moniker popular thanks to the Galaxy S20 Ultra. After that, we saw other companies such as Xiaomi adopting this name for super-premium flagships. Apparently, OnePlus is the latest company to enter the “super-premium-flagship” segment with the rumored OnePlus 10 Ultra.

OnePlus 10 Ultra to adopt Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Plus and Marisilicon X NPU

According to the tipster, Yogesh Brar, which has a very good track record, the OnePlus 10 Ultra is already in its early engineering testing phase. Based on the new leak, the OnePlus 10 Ultra may adopt Oppo’s MariSilicon X NPU. This Neural Processing Unit was announced by the company during its innovation conference in 2021. It’s making its debut with the Oppo Find X5 and X5 Pro. As you may know, Oppo and OnePlus merged their operations in the last year. As a result, we’ll see these companies sharing many technologies on a more frequent basis. So it’s natural to see the OnePlus flagships using MariSilicon X NPU as well as the 80W fast-charging. Honestly, this kind of thing always happened under the wraps. It’s no coincidence that both OnePlus, Realme, and Oppo flagships had 65W charging.

Moving on, as a late 2022 flagship, we can expect the OnePlus 10 Ultra to adopt the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus. This new chipset is yet to be released by Qualcomm, however, the first leaks are already pointing to its existence. This chipset is said to come with the Motorola Frontier, and may also arrive with some of the H2 2022 flagships. We see it as a strong candidate for the OnePlus 10 Ultra. The OnePlus 10 is said to repeat the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 use, while the OnePlus 10R will pick the Dimensity 9000. Therefore, we expect to see an upgrade with the OnePlus 10 Ultra.

It’s probably too soon to make assumptions. OnePlus could bring this device only in October 2022 as it does for the T-series. So there is still a long road before the release of the 10 Ultra.