Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor has been the hottest processor to talk about this year, no pun intended. But despite all of the rumors about overheating issues, the company has remained mostly silent about what was going on with their flagship CPU. Qualcomm’s VP of marketing, Tim McDonough, has finally stepped up to try and explain their side of things and exactly what’s going on behind the scenes with these chips.
According to McDonough, there were never any problems with overheating in commercial devices that used the 810. The keyword there is commercial: nearly every device that has ever been on the market has gone through some bumpy testing stages, whether we’re talking about phones, tablets, TVs, video games, you name it. Sometimes you’ll get some general bugs and glitches, sometimes you’ll run into strange performance issues, and other times? Yep, overheating problems. That’s probably one of the most common issues test devices will face at one point or another, and 95% it’s ironed out before launch.
That’s exactly the point Qualcomm is trying to make here. Two major devices, including the HTC One M9 and LG G Flex 2, are both notable for experiencing heat problems. Most reviews on the internet point this out, but according to Qualcomm, most of those devices weren’t running software builds made for consumers. It’s a pretty credible argument, since one of HTC’s software updates fixed the massive overheating problems that the device had, but it did so at the cost of performance over sustained loads. The Snapdragon 810 is a very, very fast processor, so that’s not something that’s immediately noticeable from day-to-day use, but newer benchmarks have noted that the processor throttles much more aggressively over longer periods of time, which isn’t a perfect solution.
McDoNough’s second point touches on LG’s choice of processors for their flagship phones. As we all know, LG opted for the Snapdragon 808 over the 810 in their G4, which was a very coincidental move after the G Flex 2’s overheating rumors. Apparently, those things are completely unrelated, though, as Qualcomm typical works with manufacturers about 18 months prior to the launch of a phone. LG decided to go with the 808 because it was designed for 2k playback, while the 810 scales for 4k playback. Why they would build for the G Flex 2 to playback 4k natively but leave that feature out of their “flagship” G4 is beyond me, but that’s Qualcomm’s answer and they’re sticking to it. We’ll honestly probably never know what actually went on behind the scenes with LG’s crop of 2015 devices and their choice of processors.
All of this explaining really makes you wonder how these rumors got started in the first place if there was no basis in reality for any of them. McDonough speculated that if another manufacturer was planning on launching on a major device with their own, in-house processors, they would stand to gain quite a bit from seeing the competition suffer from “overheating issues.” He didn’t explicitly say anything Samsung related, and refused to be drawn into any rumor-mongering, but, you know. The writing’s on the wall.
What are your thoughts on Qualcomm’s defense of their Snapdragon 810 processor? Are you buying it, or do you think it’s some mid-year damage control? Personally, I think that while some of the issues have been overblown, it’s pretty obvious that were some performance and heat issues that Qualcomm, LG, and HTC knew about. It’s acceptable to send out review units with pre-release software builds, but it’s usually a good idea to iron out the major kinks a device will have ahead of time, since they’ll have the most impact on early buyers. I don’t really buy LG’s excuse for using the 808 for 2k playback, either, especially since HTC went with the 810 on a device with a lower resolution screen. Tough to say whether or not Samsung had anything to do with the rumors spreading, but they’ve clearly been itching to use their own Exynos chips in all of their devices for a few years now. But then again, I’d bet that most consumers are buying the Galaxy S6 in droves because of things like the camera and design of the device, and I doubt that HTC is struggling with the M9 because of choice of processor. Sure, it might sway a handful of consumers that did a little research before heading to the store to pick out their device, but not enough to cause the disparity we’ve seen so far this year.
Maybe Qualcomm should just try to poach some of the guys from Samsung’s marketing team.
source: Forbes
Come comment on this article: Qualcomm talks Samsung, the Snapdragon 810, and overheating issues
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more!
