Transcription
Believe it or not, it's been 10 years since we were blessed by a chip so incredibly flawed that it probably contributed to helping a few phone brands off into the sunset, never to be seen again. This is the most controversial SOC that we've ever seen and one that lives on as a spooky ghost of what happens when you make bad chips a decade on.
So, today I want to talk about the infamous processor and what chips we've seen since that make similar mistakes. Hey guys, I'm Ryan Thomas and it makes me feel incredibly old that this was just 10 years ago, but I guess that's my life now. So there you go.
Qualcomm's chips have been a staple and anchor, a constant in the smartphone space over the last decade or so. The current 8 Elite is an absolute beast with unreal performance, though perhaps at the cost of some power efficiency. But it hasn't always been Qualcomm at the top, those being the king. And the chip I'm referencing today is proof of that. I'm sure you all know what I'm referring to. It is the infamous Snapdragon 810.
A chip so poor that it singlehandedly was responsible for a generation of phones that just kind of sucked and weren't very good for long-term ownership experiences either. It wasn't just chip-focused, but it managed to sort of set off a selection of domino effects that affected other aspects of the phones that used the chip inside. What an absolute nightmare. Guys, we're really trying to hit half a million subs. So, if you wouldn't mind hitting that button, really help us out. Thank you so much.
So, what is the Snapdragon 810? Well, it's a high-end flagship SOC built on the big little system, meaning there were some high-performance cores and some low-performance cores. Those for performance and those for efficiency. In particular, four of each with the 810. Uh, it was actually the first 64-bit mobile phone chip from the company. And it was used in the likes of the HTC 1M9, the Nexus 6P, the Xperia X 5 series, the OnePlus 2, the Glex 2, just to name a few. These were all high-end phones aiming to deliver the best performance on the market. These were expensive devices. And if we were just talking about, well, single-use raw performance, then the 810 delivered. It was a pretty quick chip for the time, one of the fastest out there. But there's far more to this than just benchmarks.
The Snapdragon 810 ran hot, like really hot. And that was a problem for several reasons. The most obvious is that it made the phone, well, incredibly hot. I'm not sure if you've ever used something like an HTC 1M9 or a Zed 5 Compact, but the phone actually starts to feel uncomfortable, a bit broken in the hand. A little bit off topic, but uh, I have that problem with the Galaxy S25 Edge right now. It just gets insanely hot, almost uncomfortable, which feels weird for a 2025 phone. So, if you have that phone, let me know in the comments if you've had the same experience.
The issue with the 810 didn't only affect the feeling in the hand though, but it contributed to heating up all the other components near it. And given we're talking about a smartphone here, well, basically everything is near it inside of that device. I mean, right next to the SoC, we have the display, the cameras, the battery, just to name a few. Not only was the heat an inefficient way of running the chip, and therefore it was just wasting energy, turning it into heat, but it also started the domino effect where your screen could end up popping out the front. Battery drain was a huge problem for the Snapdragon 810. It wouldn't take much for the chip to heat up, which would then muller your battery life before you even had a chance to rush home and charge it halfway through the day after work.
But that wasn't all, with just how hot this phone got. Batteries would degrade quicker and phones started popping open with swollen batteries. This didn't occur to every single phone with the 810, but I remember at the time seeing so many reports, way more than usual, about phones with the 810 opening themselves up, which is ironic really because it was around this time or just before when manufacturers started sealing batteries inside the phone. It was almost like they were trying to escape or something.
And thermal throttling was maybe the biggest problem of the 810's poor implementation, if you can believe that. As the chip heated up, it would drop the clock speeds to try and normalize the temperatures, which would typically result in your device slowing right down to a crawl, lagging, which is not ideal on the surface of things, but even worse when you realize that these were the most expensive phones on the market. These were the top shelf, the creme de la creme, and they were not running right.
There are a few notable models that actually skipped the 810 that year. LG's G4 went with the cut-down 808, which is built on a very similar architecture, but it removed two of the performance cores, leaving you with two big and four little. This didn't make a huge difference to the overall performance and the heat that that thing developed. And actually, the G4 had its own subset of problems with boot looping in particular being a standout issue, which is actually similarly found in the Nexus 5, also developed by LG and also having the Snapdragon 80E. So yeah, the 808 wasn't like an easy fix to the 810's disaster that year.
And Samsung famously skipped this generation of Qualcomm chips altogether in the Galaxy S6, the S6 Edge, and the Note 5, the firm's first glass and metal devices. They could easily just simply switch to Exynos that year. And that's exactly what they did, not having to lean on Qualcomm whatsoever. I bet they're really glad that they had that as an option cuz the Exynos 7420, which was found in the aforementioned Galaxy models, Samsung's own chip, was actually pretty comparable in terms of raw benchmark performance. Single-core, in particular, was really close. But it's only when you realize the chip was markedly more efficient and less wasteful than the Snapdragon model that you start to understand it was just a far more sensible option. Though, as with the aforementioned G4 and 5X, the S6 series had its own drawbacks that would have got resolved with the later generation Galaxy S7 series, not the Note 7. The Note 7 was a complete disaster as well. Wow, they're just not very good at phones in this era of smartphone, are they?
By the way, there has been a chip since that has had similar issues, not quite as bad, and that, of course, is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. It was an overheating machine; it could cause major battery drainage. And though I would still sort of recommend some of the phones that came with that chip, it's certainly much better than the 810, it's still not the best and you certainly want to avoid it if you want the best value for money. The 8 Gen 1 chip was actually built on Samsung's 4-nanometer node and it should not be confused with the 8 plus gen 1 that was built on TSMC's 4-nanometer node, which was significantly better in terms of performance and power efficiency.
LG's use of the 808 and the 810 certainly didn't help its already troubled reputation and HTC was never really the same once it released the phone with the 810 in it. In fact, LG thankfully went on to release a few cool phones after this, whereas HTC just kind of stumbled around trying to recreate the magic that it had with the HTC 1, M7, and M8 phones.
The 810 successor, the 820, was way better. Like just insanely better. Has half the amount of cores, but it had a 50% uplift in raw performance. The chip was just such a better implementation. You wondered how they got it so wrong the year before. and it fixed so many of not only the performance problems but of course the thermal ones that had really been the root cause of a lot of the problems with the 808 and the 810. The 820 was found in the North American S7 series, the LG G5, the OnePlus 3, Sony Xperia X series, most of which were deemed great successors to the phones that came before them.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 was a disaster and one that you'd hope we'd have moved on from since 2015 when we saw the bulk of 810-powered devices launch. It wasn't the first and wasn't the last chip to be really poor in terms of inefficiency and thermals, but the ripple effect that it had on the smartphone landscape was devastating. Was it the worst chip ever put in a smartphone? I certainly think so.
Guys, did you ever own a phone with the Snapdragon 810? And if you did, which model was it? I had a Zed 5 Compact in yellow, very cool, and the Nexus 6P. And to be totally honest, though I loved the Former's form factor, I never fell in love with the latter like a lot of other Android enthusiasts did. And the design was, yeah, just never really loved it. Anyway, did you run into any of the issues with your 810-powered device? Let me know in the comments. And whilst you're down there, be sure to hit like if you enjoyed today's content and subscribe to never miss another upload on this channel. Thank you all so much for watching. I've been Ryan Thomas and I will catch you later. Cheers.