Time and time again, we’ve been hearing rumours of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810’s apparent overheating problems. Two phones expected to come powered by the SoC — the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the OnePlus 2 — have seen delays; Samsung however seems to have a workaround to that in the form of its in-house Exynos 7420 chip. According to a recent Re/code report, however, all’s well with the Snapdragon 810, which I admit is a little hard to believe. What makes it more interesting is the fact that this comes straight from a Qualcomm executive, and isn’t one of those reports that have no head and tail. Let us delve deeper to see what exactly happened.
According to the report, the Qualcomm executive was quoted saying that the company didn’t really see a problem with their chipset. “We don’t see any problem with the 810,” he added. “I think there is a lot of misinformation out there,” he went on to say, pointing at the numerous reports that have been surfacing through the past month or so, speaking about the apparent overheating problems on the Snapdragon 810. The exec went on to add that the company lost a major client, which wasn’t named. But it isn’t hard to guess that its Samsung he was talking about; after all, we’ve come across innumerable reports about the Korean OEM ditching Qualcomm for the next in line flagship — the Galaxy S6. “We lost one design. We wish we had not lost that design,” added Anon, speaking about the lost client.
Qualcomm will be sampling the next flagship SoC, i.e., the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 for next year. The current gen top of the line SoC though, the Snapdragon 810, will be seen powering more than 60 products, according to the report. The Snapdragon 810 happens to be Qualcomm’s first real 64-bit high-end material. What’s more, the chip uses a directly licensed ARM core design, which is in contrast to Qualcomm’s usual practice of making its own designs for cores. The company is expected to face some serious competition from the likes of MediaTek, a company which has stepped up its high-end game after winning the entry-level battle.