Android smartphone market is heating up with new flagships, literally. It’s normal to expect flagship devices to heat but ever since last year, Android smartphones / SoC’s are heating much more than they used to. So, what’s exactly wrong? Let’s try to know what’s going on and whether things will improve or not.
Android SoC’s were quite cool and performed great (even if they were behind Apple’s Bionic chip) till SD865. With SD888, things were too hot for Android flagships. And things are similar with Snapdragon 8 Gen1 alongside Exynos and MediaTek latest flagship chipsets. However, Apple doesn’t seem to be having trouble like these.
Why recent Android SoC’s are heating up?
Let me save your time. It’s mainly because of the Samsung’s chip manufacturing process. Yes, Samsung is manufacturing the chip for Qualcomm, Exynos (ah, obviously!) and MediaTek. Meanwhile, Apple is enjoying their contract with TSMC which is having superior manufacturing process right now.
It’s the reason how Apple Bionic chips are performing great and yet managing to be power efficient when compared to Snapdragon 888, Exynos 2100 etc. chipsets. And meanwhile, the Android SoC’s are heating up much more than their predecessors.
However, apart from the manufacturing process, more powerful chipsets obviously produce more heat. So, that’s another reason why even Apple’s Bionic chips are hotter than before.
At last, initially, many manufacturers didn’t optimise their device properly for these devices, so things are slowly improving, though cannot be as good as it was before.
Here’s the source for thermals and power efficiency between devices- AnandTech.
Rumours about Qualcomm using TSMC for SD8Gen1:
Qualcomm have confirmed that they are going to use TSMC’s manufacturing process for the next version of this SoC called Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Plus. So, you can obviously expect much better efficiency from it compared to the current flagship from them.
The current flagship SoC is already really powerful and the only downside is the efficiency, so it will be great thing for Android flagships.
Will things improve soon?
MediaTek and Qualcomm are going to switch to TSMC’s 4nm manufacturing process, which would result in much better efficiency compared to their current flagships. I’ll repeat, do not expect better efficiency than SD865-like chipsets because with higher power comes higher power requirements.
So, I do expect the problem of Android SoC’s heating up will be reduced this year. However, Apple is moving ahead and switching to TSMC’s 3nm manufacturing process which would also improve it. So, you can expect iPhones to have better efficiency compared to Android flagships even this year.
