The long-awaited LG G4 announcement is nearing reality, and with it of course comes a swath of rumors that are ready to spill all of the proverbial beans before the big official announcement comes around. The G4 has been expected to be a big game changer for LG, where the G3 was sort of an incremental update the G4 was thought to be a huge change much like Samsung’s latest Galaxy S6 pushes the boundaries of hardware and software changes from previous Samsung devices. There had been rumors of a metal build, another big UI update and of course Android 5 Lollipop on board at launch, but recently we’ve been hearing some interesting hardware rumors that are raising eyebrows everywhere.
Just yesterday we saw the G4 pop up on GFX Bench, a popular benchmarking program people can use to test the performance of their device against others on the market. What surprised many people here isn’t the Quad-HD display, the 16 megapixel camera or the 3GB of RAM included inside LG’s latest flagship device, it was the Qualcomm Snapdragon 808. For those that haven’t been following the drama behind Qualcomm’s latest flagship chipsets lately, Qualcomm’s top-tier Snapdragon 810 chipset has been facing a number of alleged setbacks that all stem from the chipset running hotter than it should, some say. We’ve seen plenty of evidence to support this, and have also heard plenty of nay-sayers out there including officials from Qualcomm, LG and HTC.
But the proof might just be in the pudding, especially if LG goes with the less powerful Snapdragon 808 in its flagship instead of the 810. An insider close to LG is saying this is indeed the case and that Qualcomm’s rather interesting hybrid of powerful dual-core Cortex A57 and low power quad-core Cortex A53 cores found inside the Snapdragon 808 will grace the innards of the LG G4. While this may seem to be alarming to some the choice of the 808 is most likely due to the heat issues, which wouldn’t spring up with a less powerful chip. Also to note is that vendors are possibly downclocking the 810 in order to achieve proper heat output from the device, lowering its performance and possibly negating any advantage a more powerful quad-core Cortex A57 would bring over a dual-core version. Either way we’ll see later in April when the G4 gets officially announced.