Google Pixel Issues Correlate With Samsung Fabs
Although I personally have not had many issues with Pixel, (had the 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 series as well as 20+ family members that use pixel that haven't had any issues), I don't want to discredit the minority that do have issues on Google Pixel.
What I wanted to find out through my research, is whether there is a correlation of some issues between Samsung Foundry, and TSMC.
As we know, Samsung uses both Exynos and Qualcomm chips, depending on the region. Where as Pixel from 6 to 9, used Samsung Foundry for their Tensor chips.
So I did a lot of digging through user reported issues related to Tensor, Exynos, and Snapdragon, to see if there is a correlation of similar issues across two different chip families made at the same foundry.
Here is what I came up with:
| Issue | Pixel (Tensor) | Samsung Exynos | Samsung Snapdragon |
|---|---|---|---|
| THERMAL | |||
| Overheating during normal daily use | Yes | Yes | No |
| Severe throttling under sustained load | Yes | Yes | Rare |
| Unusable in warm/hot climates | Yes | Yes | No |
| Warm to touch on idle / light tasks | Yes | Yes | No |
| Camera app causes significant heating | Yes | Yes | Mild |
| Auto-closes apps due to heat | Yes | Yes | No |
| Clock speeds throttled far below spec | No | Yes | No |
| Overheating #1 reason for returns (confirmed) | Yes | No | No |
| MODEM / CONNECTIVITY | |||
| Weak cellular signal vs. competitors | Yes | Yes | No |
| Frequent call drops in low coverage | Yes | Yes | No |
| Slow cellular upload/download speeds | Yes | Yes | No |
| Poor Wi-Fi to cellular handoff | Yes | Yes | No |
| Modem drains excess battery on cellular | Yes | Yes | No |
| Phone warms up from cellular connection alone | Yes | Yes | No |
| 5G significantly less power-efficient | Yes | Yes | No |
| BATTERY / POWER EFFICIENCY | |||
| 30-60 min less battery vs. Snapdragon equivalent | Yes | Yes | N/A |
| High idle drain (200-250mAh) on standby | Yes | Yes | No |
| Outsized drain on Bluetooth | Yes | Yes | No |
| Disproportionate drain outdoors vs. indoors | Yes | Yes | Mild |
| Random battery drain after OTA updates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| GPU / PERFORMANCE | |||
| 10-20% lower benchmarks vs. Snapdragon gen | Yes | Yes | N/A |
| Gaming frame drops under sustained load | Yes | Yes | Rare |
| Poor game optimization (Mali vs. Adreno) | N/A | Yes | No |
| General sluggishness / UI jank | Yes | Yes | Rare |
| FABRICATION PROCESS | |||
| Samsung foundry: higher power leakage | Yes* | Yes* | No |
| Samsung foundry: lower yields / inconsistency | Yes* | Yes* | No |
As one can correlate....this doesn't look good for Samsung Foundry, and in some ways, I really think that although Google is to blame for choosing Samsung Foundry, its very hard to get low volume orders into TSMC if you can't prove sales numbers. Considering it took Pixel a while to scale to its relatively decent sales figures, that switching to TSCM going forward may improve Pixel's SOC reliability going forward.
Posted Feb 26, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC