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Snapdragon throttled to prevent firebreathing

by on08 January 2015


Where are my dragons?

Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm is facing overheating and other technological problems with its latest mobile processor.

The Snapdragon 810 was first seen in April 2014 and was designed as a 20-nanometer flagship mobile processor for high-performance smartphones. Its first outing was under the bonnet of its new flexible smartphone, the G Flex 2 at CES.

On paper it appears brilliant. It has an octa-core processor with four ARM Cortex-A57 high-performance central processing units (CPUs) and four ARM Cortex-A53 low power-consumption units that support 64-bit commands for data processing.

Its Adreno 430 graphic processing unit, which has a 30 percent increase in performance and consumes 20 percent less power than its Adreno 420 predecessor. It also supports the 4K displays.
The only problem is that it overheats at certain voltages and performance degradation caused by memory controller problems have been reported, and its clock rate, an index representing a processor's performance, was estimated to be lower than its predecessor, the Snapdragon 805.

According to the Korean Times to prevent the chip catching fire, the designers have throttled the bejeesus out of it to a point where it limits the graphic processing performance when it overheats.

The Snapdragon 810's Adreno 430 graphic processing unit and the 64-bit command support also needs more optimisation as currently they are known to be incompatible with the G Flex 2.

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