Not Cooling Off
Regarding rumors about the overheating issues of its latest Snapdragon 810 chipset, Qualcomm flatly said, “rubbish.”
In an interview with U.S. business magazine Forbes on May 6 (local time), Tim McDonough, vice president of marketing for Qualcomm, said, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Snapdragon 810 in commercial devices.”
Qualcomm claims that it is spending a lot of time addressing false rumors that have been accepted as fact. However, doubts over the performance of the Snapdragon 810 are being amplified after Samsung Electronics decided to use its Exynos 7420 in the Galaxy S6 instead of Qualcomm’s processor, and LG Electronics used the earlier Snapdragon 808 in the new G4.
Regarding the G4, McDonough said, “These decisions get made 18 months before a phone shows its face. When we were working with LG on the G Flex 2 and G4, Qualcomm produced the 810 and the 808 around the same time. The simple reason is the design goals of the G4 2k experience.”
He continued, “The difference between the two chips is that the memory is designed to deal with a maximum of 4K video natively displaying on a smartphone screen in the 810, which is our strategic product, while the 808 supports a maximum of 2K. It is able to record 4K images but unable to natively display them on the screen.”
Regardless of Qualcomm’s denial, however, the controversy over the Snapdragon 810 is expected to continue. According to a recent benchmark test conducted by foreign information technology news site Ars Technica, the G Flex 2 using the Snapdragon 810 showed poorer performance than the G4 using the Snapdragon 808, due to overheating.