Ouch, another Snapdragon 8 Elite handset overheats

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite promises big things for late 2024 and 2025 flagship smartphones. From a new custom CPU to unrivaled graphics performance, photography, and enhanced AI capabilities, it’s the chip that claims to do it all, and, for the most part, it does. However, our initial impressions of the chip have been tainted by exceedingly high temperatures when placed under stress.

First, the realme GT7 Pro overheated during benchmark tests. Even after a patch to address a “software compatibility issue” with 3DMark, the handset still hit a 47.7°C internal temperature, making for a phone that’s uncomfortable to hold when running full tilt. Next, the admirably performing ASUS ROG Phone 9 remained cool in its default performance mode but saw considerable performance throttling to keep those temperatures at a cool 34.9°C. Left unleashed in “X-Mode,” the phone recorded a scorching 55.8°C (admittedly just about as hot as last year’s model), though its robust cool solution kept performance steady. There’s a reason ASUS recommends a cooler accessory for longer gaming sessions.

Most recently, I’ve been testing out the new HONOR Magic 7 Pro. While running the phone through 3DMark’s benchmark test, the phone once again became unstuck, this time in the demanding Solar Bay ray-tracing test, shutting down the app due to overheating. See the warning popup below.

Although Solar Bay didn’t complete, despite eight separate attempts, I successfully ran 3DMark’s two Wild Life stress tests (something we initially couldn’t achieve with the realme). As before, temperatures are alarming; Wild Life hit 47.8°C while Wild Life Extreme peaked at 50.1°C, complete with a reduction to just 46.8% of its initial performance in the case of the latter. Needless to say, the phone was uncomfortably warm by the end of the runs and needed a long time to cool back down.

I’ve been running these stress tests for several generations now, and digging up past data points for HONOR’s handsets reveals a clear increase in temperatures in recent years, with a noticeable jump when moving to the Snapdragon 8 Elite. See the graph below, but note that we can’t obtain temperature data for a phone that doesn’t complete the test.

While there are, of course, differences in design, PCB layout, and cooling setups between handset generations, a temperature increase of between 5-8°C in just a couple of years will be down to the chip, at least in part. Furthermore, processors have benefitted from supposedly more efficient manufacturing nodes in recent years, which should have allowed chips to consume less power and, therefore, run cooler. Instead, Qualcomm has put those savings towards extra performance, with higher temperatures arising as a considerable side effect.

This isn’t to single out HONOR; all of the Snapdragon 8 Elite handsets we’ve seen so far run hotter (at full tilt) and/or sacrificed more performance in a bid to stay cool than their predecessors. The new OnePlus 13 also clocks peak temperatures of 45.8°C in stress tests, up from a far cooler 39.3°C on the OnePlus 12. It’s just a question of how much more heat compared to last year. So what does this mean for the chip and handsets powered by it? Is it a dud you should avoid?

First, there is a difference between these rather extreme stress test scenarios and the temperatures you’ll see in real-world scenarios. I’ve spent a while playing real games on Snapdragon 8 Elite phones and haven’t noticed the phones’ surface temperatures get anywhere near as hot as the internal numbers recorded here. These stress tests push phones above and beyond more mainstream applications that don’t require the chip to run at full tilt, so consider them a worst-case result for temperatures and a best-case result for performance potential.

Still, that doesn’t suggest this isn’t a cause for concern. A hotter chip means the phone’s internals are likely to run considerably warmer if using the phone during charging, and there’s an increased risk of performance throttling and application shutdowns when using the phone in a warm environment, such as navigating on a car dashboard. Then, there are future applications to consider. A phone built to last five to seven years will have to contend with apps and games that might end up stressing the phone’s performance capabilities, potentially resulting in higher temperatures than we see in today’s apps. Stress tests represent extreme use cases by today’s standards, but they might be more mainstream in four or five year’s time.

Perhaps worse for the Snapdragon 8 Elite is that there is a competing product on the market that offers comparable performance without the high temperatures — MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400. We benchmarked the chip and found peak stress test temperatures a good 3°C to 11°C cooler at their peaks, depending on which handsets you compare. See the Find X8 Pro and vivo X200 Pro in the graph below. Note that vivo’s cooling solution isn’t as good as OPPO’s, and performance is scaled back further to keep temps cool. Furthermore, the Dimensity 9400 runs games virtually as well as the 8 Elite, which makes you question exactly what’s going on inside Qualcomm’s latest flagship.

I don’t want to speculate too much on the source of the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s troubles, but there are a couple of potential pain points to look at with its all-new components. Although Qualcomm says they’re a ground-up development, the custom Pheonix-L and -M CPU cores share their foundations with the Oryon cores in the laptop-grade Snapdragon X platform. Perhaps there are some first-gen architecture teething troubles keeping these cores cool or specific software optimizations that aren’t always followed, especially as they can hit a colossal 4.32GHz. Qualcomm has also beefed up its Adreno GPU with a new tri-slice architecture — a higher-performing design that could, in theory, scale up to laptops. Once again, a new architecture might not be running quite as ideally as the company hoped in a confined form factor or might require further optimization from partners to balance correctly.

Further investigation is required to see precisely what TDP these components pull, but based on the heat output, I bet it’s quite high when running at full tilt. In any event, Qualcomm is clearly pushing the performance envelope with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but that’s come at the expense of higher temperatures that are causing some handsets to fail tests that haven’t troubled previous models. At the same time, realizing those high benchmark results in actual applications is not necessarily feasible — you really don’t need an 8 Elite to run the most popular Android games, for example.

On the plus side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite seems to provide robust performance without additional battery drain and is, in many instances, actually a more frugal chip than its predecessor. Temperature is just part of the story, but they are definitely something to consider when eying up a next-gen purchase. Running at full tilt, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is undeniably a hot chip.