Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun Confirms in Mi Note Pro Product Presentation That The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 Does Have Overheating Issues

Hi all

In my previous post, I wrote about how the Snapdragon 810 has been confirmed to be a defective and compromised(in my view) chip. 

Xiaomi is one of the companies I follow pretty closely. They do business here in Singapore(where I live) and I own a few of their products. I came across Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun's presentation of the Mi Note Pro launch on Youtube. Lo and behold, during the presentation, Lei Jun talks extensively about the 810's overheating issues and how Xiaomi engineers have tried to work around the problem. Now, I understand Mandarin, so I will attempt to translate what he says into English for the benefit of those that don't. 

For those that understand Mandarin, I have attached the video below. Lei Jun starts talking about the 810's overheating problems and how Xiaomi has tried to deal with the issue at the 22.40 video mark. 

Here's what Lei Jun said regarding the SD 810's overheating issues and the company's solutions 

1. The chip does overheat, and this is a result of it being so fast

In my opinion, this is a BS excuse. The Exynos 7420 used in the Galaxy S6 also features the same octa-core big.LITTLE set-up as the SD 810. In fact, the 7420's A57 cores are clocked slightly higher than the 810's. The 7420's Cortex-A57 cores run at up to 2.1GHz, and the four Cortex-A53 battery-efficient cores running at up to 1.5GHz, while the 810's A57 cores run up to 2GHz (A57, slightly underclocked) and 1.5GHz (A53).

2. Xiaomi has optimised the entire chip in collaboration with Qualcomm, and the Snapdragon 810 used in the Mi Note Pro is an updated variant, different from both the 810 in the LG G Flex 2 and HTC One M9

3. Xiaomi has come up with a way to help the Mi Note Pro dissipate heat when the processor gets hot and they have filed five patents 

4. Xiaomi has built in four "cooling films" into the device to help the Mi Note Pro dissipate the heat and apparently, it's not cheap, factoring into the building cost of the device 

It appears that the Mi Note Pro still has issues with overheating. Phonearena has an article that documents this. During the presentation, Lei Jun referred to the Mi Note Pro as the "King of Android Phones". The Mi Note Pro might arguably be the most powerful Android phone at the moment, but so what? It's only the most powerful Android phone on paper. I still think the Galaxy S6 still holds the title of current best Android smartphone.
In my view, since the start of 2015, we haven't yet seen a really compelling Android phone, other than the Galaxy S6 and the value-for-money Asus Zenfone 2. I could also argue that most Android devices of 2014 weren't all that spectacular, save for a few, but that's a conversation for another day.

Hopefully Qualcomm does better with the Snapdragon 820. I hope they do.