Arm's new designs could be the reason why this year's Android flagships are so hot
Qualcomm and Samsung's new premium chips that power a good number of the best Android flagships of 2022 have been panned for their overheating issues. Some reports had indicated that Samsung's 4nm manufacturing process was to be blamed, but it's now being suggested that something else could be the culprit.
Both Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Exynos 2200 are based on Samsung's 4nm process and have largely the same architecture, featuring one Arm Cortex X2 core for performance, three "big" Cortex-A710 cores, and four Cortex-A510 "little" cores for high-efficiency workloads.
Compared to the microarchitectures they are replacing, the X2 core is 16 percent faster, the A710 is 10 percent faster, and the A510 is 35 percent faster.
With power comes heat, and apparently, ARM's new designs are the reason why the new Snapdragon and Exynos chips heat up so fast. That appears to explain why Qualcomm's next high-end chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus, will come with a downclocked Cortex X2 core.
Does that absolve Samsung of everything? Not really, as the report says that other factors such as application processor design, peripheral components, and manufacturing processes likely also played a part.
Qualcomm is expected to ditch Samsung for TSMC for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus and MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 which is based on TSMC's 4nm process is said to be faster and more power-efficient than other Android chips, so Samsung's process could definitely use a little improvement.
Apple's Bionic chips that fuel the iPhone also use Arm's design but not only are they a lot faster, but they also don't suffer from the same overheating issues, and that's apparently because the Cupertino giant uses custom processor implementations and its chips are tailor-made for its products.
Qualcomm - and to a lesser extent Samsung - are chip vendors. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 powers a multitude of phones and it looks like the effectiveness of this off-the-shelf approach has reached its limit. To deal with this, Samsung will reportedly now focus more on building custom chips for its handsets.
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