Qualcomm’s VP of marketing once again shoots down rumors of Snapdragon 810 overheating

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 7 May 2015

qualcomm_snapdragon

In an interview with Forbes, Qualcomm’s VP of marketing Tim McDonough, has once again shot down rumors of the Snapdragon 810 chip overheating.

McDonough says that the rumors are “rubbish” and that there are no “overheating problem with the Snapdragon 810 in commercial devices.”

As for all the rumors floating around, McDonough says that since Qualcomm was the first to the market with its “premium-tier” Snapdragon 810 chipset in the LG G Flex 2, “somebody” decided to spread false rumors about the chip overheating. While not really ideal, he says that this is how business is done, and the situation has forced Qualcomm to address these false rumors.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 reference phone

When questioned as to why the One M9 and G Flex 2 overheat, McDononough says that pre-released versions of the handsets faced overheating issues, but the commercial hardware works just fine. The VP of marketing says that this is what started the rumors of the Snapdragon 810 chip overheating.

“I think someone very artfully took that and used it to fuel the rumours and took something that’s completely normal and sent it to some less sophisticated news outlets to give them a story.”

McDonough posed the simple question “who stands to gain from the rumour?”.

As for why the LG G4 uses a Snapdragon 808 chipset and not 810, McDonough says that these decisions are taken by OEMs 18 months before the handset is released to the consumer. He further adds that the Snapdragon 810 was designed for 4K devices, while the Snapdragon 808 has been scaled for 2K display devices. Both chipsets are “almost exactly the same,” except that the Snapdragon 810 memory has been designed with 4K displays in mind.

While the Snapdragon 810 might not have done as well for Qualcomm as the company had hoped for, it does expect its upcoming Snapdragon 820 to win back the customers it has lost. It will be the first chipset from the company to feature “Zeroth” — a cognitive computing platform — which is “so different that people just have to have it.”

It will act as an ‘active’ personal assistant and read the data supplied by the 10 different sensors found in most smartphones today to automatically make decisions and improve the overall smartphone experience for users.

“We trained Zeroth how to recognise the scene that you typically use when you have to manually select. Landscape, portrait and low-light – all those settings you can use but nobody does. Zeroth knows if it’s outside, inside, daytime or night-time. We also taught it to recognise objects.”

Snapdragon 820 based devices are expected to show up in Android devices later this year, and Qualcomm will also be releasing the Zeroth SDK for developers to take advantage of as well.

Whether Qualcomm accepts it or not, the Snapdragon 810 chipset does have overheating issues. Irrespective of that, it will be interesting to see how the company bounces back with its upcoming chipset — the Snapdragon 820.

[Via Forbes]