Samsung Working on Snapdragon 820 Heating Issues for Galaxy S7: Report

As per a new report, Samsung is currently busy working on modifying the recently unannounced Snapdragon 820 SoC for its rumoured Galaxy S7 smartphone as the processor has heating issues. This reminds us about the chipmaker's Snapdragon 810 processor, which last year came in to the news for similar reasons.

The report by Business Korea claims Samsung is currently looking to modify the processor's control program to deal with the heat issues, and if that doesn't work, it would build a radiating pipe inside the rumoured Galaxy S7 to limit the SoC's overheating. Although Samsung has the option to include its own home-brewed Exynos SoC in the handset, the report states that the company has decided to incorporate the unannounced SoC in its Galaxy S7 "at all costs." Interestingly, Samsung will reportedly be manufacturing the chips in its own foundries.

As reported earlier this year, Samsung might use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor in select markets only, mainly US and China. The company would use its Exynos processors for other regions.

As we know already, Samsung for its flagship smartphones this year - the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge+, and Galaxy Note 5 - used its Exynos processors instead of Qualcomm's. All four smartphones are powered by the 64-bit octa-core Exynos 7420 SoC with four Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 2.1GHz, and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz, coupled with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

For those unaware, the Snapdragon 810 processor was in the news since late last year came for its overheating issues. Qualcomm since that time has done its best to rubbish reports. The LG G Flex 2 was the first smartphone to incorporate the SoC. The company later confirmed it faced some heating problems with the processor but was able to implement a fix.

Sony also confirmed the problem in its recent Xperia Z3+. HTC's One M9 was also reported to be suffering from overheating issues due to the chipset, but the problem was later fixed with a software update.

Separately, Xiaomi said it had worked with Qualcomm to create a customised v2.1 of the Snapdragon 810 processor to optimise it for the Mi Note Pro. Qualcomm also worked with OnePlus for the Snapdragon 810 v2.1, which debuted with OnePlus 2.