Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 rumored to have overheating issues

Earlier this month, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, and pretty soon after that the first Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 benchmarks appeared online. The new chip appears to be more than 10% faster compared to the current Snapdragon 888 in single and multi-core performance, and although these numbers are not quite the 20% leap promised by Qualcomm, they’re impressive nonetheless.

Unfortunately, there’s a cryptic tweet by famous tipster @IceUniverse, suggesting that the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset has some overheating issues. “On moto phones, the extreme test of the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is very hot. Please be mentally prepared, 2022 may be a “HOOOT” year for Android phones,” reads the tweet in question.

 

On moto phones, the extreme test of Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is very hot. Please be mentally prepared, 2022 may be “HOOOT”year for Android phones.

— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) December 9, 2021

 
The Motorola connection here is probably the Moto Edge X30 - the phone was the first officially unveiled device with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset on board. Motorola undercut other brands such as ZTE and Xiaomi (the latter boasted on Twitter that its Xiaomi 12 model will be the world’s first Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-equipped phone) but the latest info from IceUniverse raises concerns about the thermal throttling issues the new chipset might have.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 specs and performance

The latest and greatest silicon from Qualcomm is built in Samsung’s foundries using a 4nm manufacturing process. Here are all the features at a glance:

• Up to 3GHz Kryo CPU with Cortex-X2 cores.
• 30% faster Adreno GPU with 25% lower power consumption.
• The world’s first X65 5G modem to reach 10 Gigabit download speeds.
• First 18-bit image signal processor for mobile.
• First 8K HDR10+ video capture for mobile.
• Mega low-light capture snaps 30 images and merges the best parts into one shot.
• Always-On ISP for fast face unlocking and locking.
• 7th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine for voice analysis and Leica Leitz Look bokeh filters.
• Bluetooth Low Energy audio features like broadcasting, stereo recording, and voice back-channel for gaming.
• First platform with Android Ready Secure Element support, the new standard for digital car keys or drivers’ licenses.

And here’s a little table comparing the leaked benchmark results of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 with its predecessor, as well as some Apple silicon. As you can see, despite all the efforts, the Gen 1 is still behind Apple’s A15 Bionic, at least for now. Actually, the A14 also comes on top of Qualcomm’s latest flagship but that’s to be expected, given the large cores and huge amount of L-cache inside Apple’s Bionic architecture.