Qualcomm released their 4nm-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip earlier this month. The company promised a 20% leap in performance over the Snapdragon 888 SoC, which was confirmed yesterday by Motorola, who launched their first smartphone powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, the Moto Edge X30.
Earlier today, the General Manager of Motorola, Chen Jin, took to Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site to boast the structural features of their latest flagship model, including its aluminum alloy frame, which allows the device to offer excellent thermal conductivity helping maintain the phone’s temperature.
However, there may be some trouble brewing as a tweet by renowned tipster @IceUniverse, suggests that the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip may have heating issues.
The tweet reads “On moto phones, the extreme test of Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is very hot. Please be mentally prepared, 2022 may be “HOOOT” year for Android phones.”
The Moto phone mentioned in the tweet is the newly released Moto Edge X30, which has undercut other brands like Xiaomi to be the first to debut the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 chip.
But as mentioned, the tweet warns about being mentally prepared for a ‘Hot year for Android phones’, indicating that the cause of the problem is the chip and not a structural issue of the device.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 chip uses Samsung’s 4nm node and ARM’s v9 architecture, which is highly power efficient.
So, in theory, it looks like the SoC should run cooler in comparison to the last generation. But the issue here is the additional performance gain, as skeptics have pointed out that Motorola may not be throttling the chip’s performance enough to keep the temperatures under control in cases of heavy usage.
For those in the dark, thermal throttling happens when the chip heats up due to constant heavy usage like gaming, video recording, or running processor-incentive apps.
To prevent the SoC from overheating and potentially damaging or degrading, smartphone companies program temperature limits into their devices which once crossed results in slowing down of the CPU, aka throttling, to help it maintain safe temperatures and cool down.
This results in a notable reduction in performance. This cooling method is employed as OEMs have little to no room for other cooling solutions due to smartphones getting slimmer while gaining performance year by year.
It is early to accurately tell what the root cause of this heating issue is, so stick around as we will keep you updated.
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