14 DAY TRIAL // Qualcomm received a big blow when Samsung said “no thanks” to using the Snapdragon 810 chipset into the Galaxy S6 flagship. The South Korean device maker chose to go with its homegrown Exynos 7420 chipset instead, and apparently, it chose wisely.
Owners of flagships taking advantage of the Snapdragon 810 were soon complaining about overheating issues. Samsung continued the same trend this year and used the same Exynos 7420 for the Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ as well. But will 2016 mark Samsung’s return to Qualcomm?
The US chip giant is actively working on readying the next-gen Snapdragon 820. The chip is inherently different from the Snapdragon 810, because unlike the latter, it relies on Qualcomm’s own custom cores dubbed Kyro and not ARM’s. So hopefully, there will be no overheating issues with the Snapdragon 820.
That’s why it didn’t really come as a big shock when, a while ago, we told you that the Galaxy S7 was apparently spotted in some leaked documents with a Snapdragon 820 on board. This would mean that Samsung might return to its original pattern of unleashing two versions of its flagship, one with a Snapdragon chipset and one with an Exynos silicon inside.
Samsung is trying to decide if the Snapdragon 820 is good enough
Now, a new report suggests that this might as well be the case. According to Dreamx, Samsung has yet to make up its mind about the Snapdragon 820 and is avidly testing the chipset internally to determine whether the platform is good enough or has issues.
The Snapdragon 820 will come with a 64-bit quad-core CPU with 14nm FinFET and promises a 35% improvement over the Snapdragon 810. The silicon piece features Adreno 530 CPU, LP-DDR4 RAM support, Cat.10 LTE modem and support for 4K60 fps encode/decode, UFS and eMMC 5.1 storage solutions.
We expect Samsung to make a decision soon, as we have been hearing rumors that the company will be able to finalize work on the Galaxy S7 by December, so who knows, we might be looking at an early launch as in the case of the Galaxy Note5.