Samsung has temporarily discontinued its partnership with Qualcomm since the failure of the latter's Snapdragon 810. But recently, the South Korean phone manufacturing giant is considering either to use the latest Snapdragon 820 processor or to stick with their very own next-gen Exynos chipset for its next flagship device, the Galaxy S7 codenamed "Jungfrau".
NDTV Gadgets says that Samsung's top smartphones for this year were built with the locally made 14nm Exynos processors. These devices are the Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, and Galaxy S6 Edge Plus, all running the Exynos 7420 SoC.
In 2015, the South Korean tech company abandoned Qualcomm's mobile processors after receiving complaints of their devices overheating and throttling. These issues were confirmed by LG. Android Geeks reports that Samsung may be skeptic of using Snapdragon 820 because of the previous problems in 810 but is not totally closing its doors to Qualcomm's new product.
Qualcomm keeps its hopes up, although it definitely suffered from the Snapdragon 810 issues and Samsung's withdrawal. With its new Snapdragon 820 processor, Qualcomm expects to fix the bugs in 810 and turn things around with Samsung.
The new quad-core Snapdragon 820 SoC is rumored to feature "Hydra" cores, Adreno 530 GPU, 14nm FinFET technology much like Exynos 7420's, a 4GB LPDDR4 RAM support, 4K60 fps encode/decode, Cat.10 LTE connectivity, and a UFS storage. These features are said to give the 820 chipset a 40% higher performance than the problematic 810 processor. It has also been reported that Qualcomm did away with its usual Cortex-based model and now uses eight Kyro custom cores.
A report by Tech Times describes Samsung's test experiments with the Snapdragon 820 SoC as "rigorous". Recent results show so far, that Qualcomm's new chipset is performing well. J.K. Shin of Samsung considers renewing the company's ties with Qualcomm, saying: "We have to use the best engines to make our products competitive, which is why we opted our own chips. But we may very well end up using products from Qualcomm again in the next Galaxy phone."
As Samsung continues experimenting with Snapdragon 820 SoC, rumors are circulating that the company plans to release two variants of the Galaxy S7. The version intended for international markets will be running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 and the other model powered by Exynos M1 will be available for purchase in South Korea. Both will run Google's latest Android M software update.
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