[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
That article uses a lot of words to say very little, bury the fact that they did not actually test the 810 CPU, and then speculate at endless length about a Samsung and/or Wall Street conspiracy to bring Qualcomm down.

Fist of all, that article was published on March 2, before almost any phones with the 810 were actually available and when stories about overheating were very much just rumors in the media (as the article claims). Subsequently, of course, many phones have been release and as ArsTechnica shows (links above) phones with the 810 run warm and throttle, as already discussed at length in this thread.

Second, in ArsTechnica's main article on this isssue, from April 23, they state that Qualcomm did implicitly acknowledge to them that they used a different process for designing the 810, with off the shelf cores, rather than custom designed cores, and this lead to the issue. So at first Qualcomm denied the whole problem, before there were phones that could be tested by third parties. Then they just mostly went silent and quietly acknowledged the issue. Further, other companies who use the 810 have acknowledged explicitly that there is a problem with it, such as Sony: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...n-810-is-causing-xperia-z3-overheating-issues

Third, the article from Semiaccurate, despite all its fancy charts and thousands of words, does not test the CPU in the 810 at all. It's only test was, "at CES we played with several LG G Flex 2’s at pre-show events," and then from this they conclude it "didn’t show any problems with the main CPU or GPU cores." "Playing with" a phone is not a scientific test, nor would it turn up the difference between cold (good) CPU performance from the 810 and warm (bad) CPU performance from the 810. All of the lengthy tests in the article are about power draw on the modem in the 810 and modem throughput (remember the chipset also includes the cellular radio), which have nothing to do with the issue which is overheating of the CPU and throttling. So it's just a clever diversion from the real issue or a strange complete missing of the point.

What's more, at the outset the article acknowledges that the 810 when in development ran hot. "The first silicon dev boards actually ran a bit hot, not overheating but hotter than final silicon was meant to run." We now know that the solution to this issue was the excessive throttling.

So I really don't know what motivated that person to spend so much time on such a technical issue and address it so badly. It's a weird article that is both very technically sophisticated, then ignores things like the difference between cold testing and warm testing the CPU, then debunks the wrong problem at great length (modem power drawn and throughput), while doing nothing more to address the actual issue (CPU heat and throttling) than "play with" the phone at the Consumer Electronics Show and talk subjectively about how it feels in the hand. And finally spends most of its thousands of words speculating about industry conspiracies. And of course, it was published before most phones had come out and been better tested by ArsTechnica and others; yet the article was never updated to respond to the real world tests that show the issue is real, as well as to account for Qualcomm's implicit acknowledgement of the issue (and the throttling solution).

If I had to guess, I'd think that article was PR paid for by Qualcomm to try to crush the (well founded it turned out) overheating rumors, during the time before the 810 was released in actual phones. Except it's such a long, technical, and paranoid article that I can't imagine who would read it and how it could be effective PR. As it is, it seems like it is just an attempt on the part of someone who does consulting to demonstrate their expertise to potential clients, as PR for their own business, but instead reveals a lot of holes in their reasoning and tendency to look for conspiracies.