Samsung might have been wise to go with its own 14nm Exynos for the Galaxy S6 not only for business reasons - using its own superior SoC - but also because of reports that the first batches of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 could not keep their cool the way the TSMC foundry was producing them.
Qualcomm went on a PR offensive after the reports, which is extremely rare for the company, touting the Snapdragon 810 virtues with LG, Sony, Motorola and others all lining up behind the chip maker, saying that they will all use the powerful silicon in their upcoming flagships. Reports poured in that the overheating issues are overcome, and mass production is now slated for mid-March, in time to go into all those HTC, LG, Sony and other high-end models tipped with the chipset. There were even reports the other day that Snapdragon 810 runs a tad cooler than Snapdragon 801 in last year's flagships.
The thing is that all those benchmarks and temperature measurements we saw recently are done on Qualcomm's reference Snapdragon 810 platform, which is a thick pieces of a slab, not on a thin retail flagship where heat matters. Well, there is only one of those on the market with Qualcomm's first Snapdragon 810 batch inside - the LG G Flex 2 - and someone decided to run the cross-platform Geekbench on the handset to see what will happen. Here's what happened from the first to the ninth run of the test:
As you can see, thermal throttling of the processor speed kicked in as soon as the second pass, while at the last try the single core result went down in half, and the multicore mark diminished more than 30% in order to prevent overheating, which wouldn't bode well for gaming and other strenuous processing activities on the thin curved handset, if all units are like that.
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Other than this incident, the G Flex 2 proved pretty capable, at least in the comparison with the Snapdragon 805 in the Note Edge you see below, beating it by a tad in most scores. When it comes to Samsung's new 14nm Exynos 7 Octa that will be in the Galaxy S6, well, things are getting dicey for Qualcomm's finest.
Daniel, a devoted tech writer at PhoneArena since 2010, has been engrossed in mobile technology since the Windows Mobile era. His expertise spans mobile hardware, software, and carrier networks, and he's keenly interested in the future of digital health, car connectivity, and 5G. Beyond his professional pursuits, Daniel finds balance in travel, reading, and exploring new tech innovations, while contemplating the ethical and privacy implications of our digital future.
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