Qualcomm throttles its Snapdragon 810 processor just to stay cool?

We recently wrote about how the Snapdragon 810 doesn’t overheat, but what if it really does?

As it turns out, Qualcomm’s top of the line processor might just be throttling it’s performance just to stay frosty, which might be very well the reason why Samsung decided to drop it it’s home-brewed Exynos chips. Qualcomm is indeed trying to shed it’s overheating perceptions but Samsung has probably made the right choice.

However, as explored by GeekTech, it doesn’t look to be all it seems as benchmarking test seem to say that we aren’t getting the whole picture. Granted that they did release that their devices would have a skin temperature limit of 45°C and that it is indeed cooler than their last device, but their reference device looks like it might be misleading the scores as it’s much thicker and probably has better cooling than your average smartphone. AnandTech didn’t find any issues with the SD 810 either, so it’s a little puzzling, because their tests did show a good 33% boost over the SD 805 and GFXBench results tell us that there was only about 10% performance increase as opposed to the 30% claimed by Qualcomm.

David from AndroidPolice also ranted about a device that he can’t mention (likely to be a LG G Flex 2) with benchmark scores that deteriorate greatly after each iteration of testing. This indicates that the processor is capping it’s full potential as it starts to heat up. It’s akin to putting a leash on a horse in the middle of a race and that really doesn’t bode well for Qualcomm.

Thanks to Fish for the heads up!