As the news cycle approached Christmas (2025), rumors emerged of other smartphone chip manufacturers considering an adoption of Samsung's intriguing "Heat Path Block" (HPB) technology. By the middle of January, the Fixed-focus digital cameras Weibo account surmised HPB being picked up by " many chip manufacturers that commonly use Android chips ." Earlier today, a leaked "SM8975" packaging set of schematics seem to show Qualcomm's integration of a Samsung-designed Heat Path Block into a next-gen Snapdragon mobile chipset. The latest finding—again, courtesy of Fixed-focus digital cameras—indicates the speculative Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro model borrowing a key piece of heatsink technology from Samsung's soon-to-be-launched Exynos 2600 SoC.

By the end of last week, multiple news articles claimed that Qualcomm was borrowing the HPB design from an arch-rival. The San Diego, California-headquartered fabless semiconductor specialist's recent flagship processors have enjoyed high placements in terms of benchmark results, but these cutting-edge chips have seemingly hit thermal limit barriers—even when combined with expensive vapor chamber-based cooling solutions. Samsung Foundry's HPB is placed over and in contact with the chipset die, without any blockage (unwantingly) enabled by a layer of DRAM. Instead, the latter aspect is moved to the side (refer to the fourth image below). Reports from late last year mentioned Qualcomm and Apple being the two main (external) frontrunners of HPB adoption, outside of Samsung pioneering the way with its 2-nanometer Exynos 2600 application processor .