Although every Android phone manufacturer has shouted “to surpass Apple” at their press conferences, compared to the iPhone, Android flagship models in the past two years have not only fallen behind in performance but also faced overheating issues. In 2021, how to suppress the heat and power consumption of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chip became a common challenge for all Android phone brands. Some humorously referred to the Snapdragon 888 as the “Fire Dragon,” which single-handedly drove the market for cooling materials and even cooling accessories, forcing phone manufacturers to limit chip performance for optimization.
The latest Snapdragon 8 series (8 Gen1) has also not escaped the heat and power consumption issues, with its nickname upgraded from “Fire Dragon” to “Flame Dragon.” The new Arm X2 core refreshes the single-core power consumption record from 3.3W to 4W, while the new A710 core has 2.1W (with three middle cores); the new Adreno GPU’s power consumption in the GFXBench Manhattan 3.0 scenario has also jumped from 8.2W of Snapdragon 888 to 10.9W. This is a power consumption figure never seen in the history of mobile SoCs, with both CPU and GPU peak power consumption exceeding 10W, resembling levels seen in tablet computers or even ultrabooks.
@Ice universe recently released a leak claiming that this year’s Android phones will likely continue to face thermal control challenges. Previously, everyone thought this was due to Samsung’s manufacturing process, but Electronic Engineering Magazine analyzed that TSMC-manufactured Kirin 9000 and Apple A14 also have the same issues. In 2021, without Kirin chips, Huawei exited the high-end market, while other domestic phone brands began to focus on high-end models but were hampered by old processors with high heat output, watching helplessly as Apple snatched most of Huawei’s high-end users.
Compared to the A15 in the iPhone 13 series, the Snapdragon 8 has lost overall performance but won in energy consumption and heat (Image from: Geek Bay)
The same heating issue also appears in the Samsung 5/4nm Exynos 2100 and Exynos 2200 (European and Korean versions of the Samsung Galaxy S21 and S22 series). The latter is the first mobile SoC equipped with AMD’s RDNA2 GPU, but its GPU performance has not surpassed that of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Dimensity 9000, and its CPU part also shows a regression in power efficiency compared to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
On the MediaTek side, the Dimensity 9000 mass production model does show a better energy efficiency than Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, but its peak power consumption remains exaggerated, and its energy efficiency is not as impressive as that of the engineering model.
In 2022, all three flagship SoCs adopting the new Armv9 architecture have fallen into pitfalls regarding energy consumption and overheating. What’s going on? Recently, according to South Korean media BusinessKorea, analysts have indicated that the high power consumption and overheating issues in mobile phones are not solely Samsung’s manufacturing process problems, but rather issues with Arm architecture design.
“Currently, Qualcomm Snapdragon and Samsung Exynos application processors are used in most Android flagship phones from Samsung, Xiaomi, and Motorola, and these phones have issues with heat, performance, and power consumption,” the analyst stated, adding, “Application processors are designed based on the Arm architecture, and chips manufactured by Samsung Electronics and TSMC have confirmed the same issues, indicating that the problem lies not with the manufacturers but with the designers.”
Previously, it was reported that Qualcomm has handed over the upgraded Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Plus to TSMC for 4nm process manufacturing, abandoning the current Samsung 4nm process, but the issues of power consumption and overheating have not fundamentally changed. It is understood that in the current internal tests, the power consumption of Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Plus has not improved, and analysts believe this is due to the high performance and high power consumption issues of Arm’s latest Cortex X1/2 cores, leading Qualcomm to potentially reduce the frequency of the Cortex X2 cores in the processors.
Additionally, experts have pointed out that these issues are caused by a combination of manufacturing processes, application processor designs, peripheral components, and the inherent performance of smartphones. “The iPhone application processor is also based on Arm architecture design, but this phone has never had issues with heat and performance,” one expert said. “Although the iPhone is also based on Arm architecture chip design, Apple and Arm have optimized the processors for iOS,” he explained, adding, “On the other hand, Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm are developing various models of application processors suitable for different wafer foundry processes, suggesting that using generic processors without any optimization for mobile phone design is likely to lead to the aforementioned issues.”
In earlier leaks, @Ice universe also indicated that if we want to see changes in the current Arm architecture processors, we may have to wait for Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in two years, when the Nuvia team will have redesigned the architecture.
This article references reports from BusinessKorea, Fast Technology, Technews, Lei Feng Network, and Yiou Network.