Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 shown to run comparatively cool

by Mark Tyson on 16 February 2015, 13:19

Tags: Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), Samsung (005935.KS), LG Electronics (066570.KS), PC

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Recent reports indicating that Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 chipset, the company's highest performing platform to date, is a bit of a hot potato look to be undeserved. STJS Gadgets Portal has revealed its findings in a recent heat test of the new Snapdragon 810 and compared it to the established Snapdragon 801 chipset. The results clearly show that the 810 runs cooler than the 801.

The waste heat produced by the Snapdragon 810 was allegedly high enough to cause Samsung to drop it from its upcoming Galaxy S6 smartphone. However LG has already completely dismissed the issue, it has confirmed it observed overheating problems related to the use of Qualcomm's premier 20mm SoC in its smartphones.

The STJS heat tests measured the temperature of the surface of the smartphone in a 25 degree Celsius room-temperature environment. The charts show two separate tests ran on Device A (commercial smartphone with Snapdragon 801) and Device B (pre-commercial smartphone with Snapdragon 810), one with Asphalt 8 being played to check gaming performance, and a second where 4K videos were recorded on the devices. In both tests, Device A got hotter when performing the tasks than Device B did.

At first glance you could say the tests indicate that Samsung's slating of the Snapdragon 810 thermals is simply a smear from a competitor. Of course, this test does not singlehandedly show that overheating was not an issue with the Snapdragon 810 processor as used by Samsung in testing, as variations in device designs could change temperatures considerably. In other considerations it's not clear whether Qualcomm has since refined the 810 SoC to improve its thermal performance since Samsung decided to go Exynos-only.

Heavy-handed thermal throttling?

Another report looking at the performance of the Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810, published earlier today, sees evidence of rather heavy handed thermal throttling in the LG G Flex 2 curved smartphone.

Pondering the benchmarks gained over nine runs of GeekBench, with the Snapdragon 810 chip getting progressively hotter Phone Arena observed benchmark scores decline by nearly 50 per cent in single threaded tasks and up to 30 per cent in multi-threaded tasks. Those figures represent quite a hit due to thermal throttling being active.



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Are they just skin temperatures though? If so, and unless the test devices are identical, it doesn't tell us much about SoC temperature. ~40 seems far too low to be realistic for SoC temp under gaming load though. It doesn't take much for the Krait S4 in my Nexus 4 to exceed 60C under load.

Of course I don't know how true the ‘overheating’ rumour is, but showing a graph with skin temps on dissimilar devices doesn't prove it either way.
Firstly, comparing two different devices, each presumably with different cooling characteristics, is not a fair test.
Secondly, running the same workload is not a fair representation of maximum power draw. Presumably the 810 is capable of much higher performance. What's needed is a comparison of maximum power usage by running a proper stress test program on each device. You can hardly compare device A at 100% vs device B at 50% and claim that because device A is 10% hotter, device B doesn't have overheating issues..
We seem to be dangerously close to a Qualcomm monopoly for current-gen flagship devices, so it would probably be a good thing to have some more diversity for the ARMv8 SoCs anyway TBH.
watercooled
We seem to be dangerously close to a Qualcomm monopoly for current-gen flagship devices, so it would probably be a good thing to have some more diversity for the ARMv8 SoCs anyway TBH.

Mediatek are actually starting to do well. Their MT6595 was a strong performer last year and this year their MT6752 and MT6732 are pretty strong in the mid and low range segments. I'm looking forward to seeing how their MT6795 in the highend segment performs. The only problem is that globally, not many phone manufacturers are using the Mediatek SoCs which is probably because they don't share their kernel source code and thus support for it is pretty crap. Not to mention they are also breaking the GPL agreements by not doing so.

I don't understand why they make good chips and not provide the source code for them. If they did that then I'm sure they'd be more takers for their chips.
I was speaking more about the Western flagship market. Everything seems to use a Snapdragon 800/805 at the moment.

Interestingly a few more non-Samsung devices seem to be using Exynos processors now, e.g. the Meizu MX4 which has just been reviewed by Anandtech.