The latest flagship Qualcomm chipsets are extremely powerful and now compete with Apple's own silicon. However, heat is a real issue, and as we saw in our labs, thermal throttling is a thing on Snapdragon 8 Elite and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chips.
According to a rumor, Qualcomm might use Samsung's technology on its next flagship processors in order to tackle the overheating issues.
The Chinese tipster Fixed-Focus Digital posted a wild claim on Weibo, suggesting that Qualcomm will use Heat Pass Block (HPB) on flagship processors released later this year. The post was spotted first by Android Authority and machine translated.
Fixed-Focus Digital thinks that Qualcomm will use HPB tech on its latest chipsets | Image by Weibo
The Heat Pass Block is a Samsung creation and is basically a heat sink that sits on top of the silicon chip itself. This provides additional heat dissipation, along with the other conventional cooling solutions.
Samsung already uses this tech on the Exynos 2600 processor, expected to make an appearance on Galaxy S26 series devices in some regions of the world. The Korean company started to offer this technology to other companies two months ago, so the timeline is a bit tight, and we're not sure whether Qualcomm had managed to bake the new tech into the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6.
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Normally, Qualcomm launches its flagship silicon sometime around September, so we'll have to wait and see if the company managed to employ the heat sing on a chip and what the thermal performance of this new silicon will be.
Does thermal throttling even matter in real life scenarios?
During my time with the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phones (I tested two of the top 3 when it comes to raw performance), I found all of them very hot during stress tests and synthetic benchmarks.
However, one could argue that such intense loads can hardly be achieved in normal day-to-day scenarios. I've been using one of these "hot" phones as a daily driver for the past couple of months and not once did I feel the phone overheated or throttled.
I can imagine a pretty niche scenario where you would run a super-heavy game or some kind of rendering software and get the phone hot. But for the regular user, this overheating scare shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Have you ever experienced overheating on your phone?
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Mariyan, a tech enthusiast with a background in Nuclear Physics and Journalism, brings a unique perspective to PhoneArena. His childhood curiosity for gadgets evolved into a professional passion for technology, leading him to the role of Editor-in-Chief at PCWorld Bulgaria before joining PhoneArena. Mariyan's interests range from mainstream Android and iPhone debates to fringe technologies like graphene batteries and nanotechnology. Off-duty, he enjoys playing his electric guitar, practicing Japanese, and revisiting his love for video games and Haruki Murakami's works.
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