Is your 2022 smartphone running a bit hot? ARM’s new design might be the reason why

Phones can get pretty hot if you use it for intensive tasks like playing games and that’s kind of normal. What’s not normal if it gets hot when you’re not doing anything particularly intensive, like surfing the web, sending emails, chatting, and so on, but that seems to be a problem plaguing some of 2022’s smartphones.

In particular, this seems to be an issue with devices running either Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset or Samsung’s Exynos 2200, but it appears that neither Qualcomm nor Samsung are 100% at fault and that the problem could actually lie in ARM’s new chip design.

For those unfamiliar, the majority of system-on-a-chips out there are based on ARM’s design, albeit with a few tweaks and customization to get it to where companies want. It seems that due to ARM’s latest design, it has caused phones using the latest chipsets to overheat more than usual. According to Business Korea’s source:

“At present, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Samsung Electronics’ Exynos application processors are in use in most flagship Android phones and these phones are problematic in terms of heating, performance and power consumption. The application processors have been designed by ARM, the same problems have been confirmed in both of those manufactured by Samsung Electronics and TSMC, and thus it can be said that the cause is not the manufacturers but the designer.”

What’s interesting is that Apple seems to be largely unaffected. Apparently this is due to the fact that Apple has greater control over their hardware which allows them to better optimize ARM’s latest designs, which in turn prevents it from overheating. At the moment it is unclear what can be done to address the issue, so hopefully manufacturers will be able to figure something out.

Source: Business Korea