Qualcomm’s latest and greatest chipset — the Snapdragon 810 — is a monster in terms of performance, features, as well as heat generation. The chip is so hot that every major handset using the chipset is suffering from overheating issues. 

To fix these issues, Qualcomm has released a new variant of the Snapdragon 810 chipset with tweaks to thermal management and performance improvements in other areas. Current Snapdragon 810 powered devices like the HTC One M9 and the LG G Flex 2 make use of the v2 variant of the chipset, with newer handsets like Xiaomi’s Mi Note Pro, Sony Xperia Z3+/Z4 and the upcoming OnePlus 2 making use of v2.1 of the chipset.

As benchmarks and testing from AnandTech reveals, the updated version of the chipset comes with a number of major enhancements, despite the version number bump suggesting otherwise. First and foremost, Qualcomm has boosted the Adreno 430 GPU clock speed from 600 on v2.0 to 630 MHz. While small, this roughly leads to a performance improvement of 5 percent. Additionally, Qualcomm has made major improvements to memory bandwidth of the chipset, with an average increase of more than 30 percent throughout the board.

To reduce the overheating issues, Qualcomm has also worked on the thermal management of the chipset. While the high-power A57 cores throttle less than before, the overheating issue still persists in certain conditions with heavy load.

While not perfect, the v2.1 revision of the Snapdragon 810 chipset seems to be significantly better in terms of thermal performance than the version of the chipset, which is already found inside existing devices in the market.

It is unclear if HTC and LG will be silently shifting to Snapdragon 810 v2.1 chipset on the One M9 and G Flex 2, or continue using the older version of the chipset on their devices. If they do, they will sure end up angering a lot of existing owners of these handsets.

Make sure to head over to AnandTech to read the in-depth article about the improvements in v2.1 of the Snapdragon 810 chipset.