According to DigiTimes, Samsung is considering returning to vapor chamber cooling in its future smartphones. Apparently, upstream supply chain sources believe that Samsung will adopt superior solutions next year. DigiTimes did not state which smartphones would feature advanced cooling solutions, though.
For some reason, the South Korean company omitted even copper heatpipes from the Galaxy S21 series, including the range-topping Galaxy S21 Ultra. By contrast, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has a large vapor chamber, or a copper heat pipe for the Exynos edition.
Unsurprisingly, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra runs cooler than the Galaxy S21 Ultra under sustained load. Vapor chamber cooling in Samsung smartphones started well before the Galaxy Note 20 series too, as iFixit demonstrated with the Galaxy Note 9 and Galaxy S10, for example.
Samsung is expected to announce an Exynos SoC with an AMD RDNA 2-based GPU soon, which will probably make its way into the Galaxy S22 series. Qualcomm's flagship SoCs tend to run hot too, so returning to vapor chambers for the Galaxy S22 series could be a good move for Samsung.