A couple of weeks ago that Qualcomm unveiled its latest chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC, leading to a slew of smartphone makers sharing plans for its inclusion in their respective flagship devices. While the chipset has a lot to boast about, it may also be carrying an overheating problem from its immediate predecessors.
A known tipster Ice Universe claims Qualcomm's latest flagships didn't perform well during an "extreme test" performed on the Moto Edge X30 that became the first smartphone to arrive with the new SoC. This could be worrisome for phone makers as they get ready to power into 2022 with a slew of flagships, carrying this chipset.
- Check out which devices will pack the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
- Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset is manufactured by Samsung
The US-based semiconductor company had used the latest 4nm-based process to manufacture the the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, guaranteeing a 20% performance boost over its predecessor the Snapdragon 888, a claim which was confirmed when the Moto Edge X30 scored over 1 million on AnTuTu.
The latest report about the device overheating under extreme tests may not sound so worrisome but for the fact that there were reports in November that actually did suggest this issue on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The same tipster had claimed then that while the flagship chipset had improved in all aspects such as GPU, AI and ISP, the issue of over-heating remained.
Is it a cause for concern?
The latest thermal throttling issues on chipset should be a cause for concern for the phone makers slated to launch their flagships in the first quarter of 2022. In the past, both the Snapdragon 888 and its over-clocked version, the Snapdragon 888+, were manufactured using 5nm fabrication and came with overheating issues.
The latest flagship chipset is made with the smaller 4nm node, which denotes that all of what it contains has shrunk a tiny bit. To expect the process itself to result in a cooler device doesn't work, given that phone makers would have to come up with a few options of optimizing performance through software interventions, which is what OnePlus had done earlier this year to fix the overheating on its flagship device.
Is there a cause to panic? We don't think so as thermal throttling has been a regular challenge on Android flagship phones over the past year or two. The need to keep the devices sleek and cramming the processors could be the obvious cause for this challenge. We believe optimizations will work out for now, though semiconductor makers and smartphone manufacturers may have to sit across to find better means of thermal management in their future devices.
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