Earlier this year, rumors of the Snapdragon 810 overheating took the mobile world by storm. Qualcomm claimed that these rumors were false, but we all knew that wasn’t the case. Regardless, this later caused Samsung to drop the Snapdragon 810 altogether for their Galaxy S6/S6 edge duo, which was for the best. The Exynos 7420 is still one of the most powerful processors on the market. The latest news is that Samsung could be heading back to Qualcomm and using the Snapdragon 820 on the Galaxy S7.
This is quite surprising, mainly because how well the Exynos processors perform with their 14nm process. That means Qualcomm must have something special going with the Snapdragon 820 which would cause Samsung to go back on their in-house processor, at least for some models.
This isn’t the first time that we have heard that the Galaxy S7 could feature the Snapdragon 820 and this doesn’t seem like it will be the last. According to the leak on Weibo, Qualcomm has shipped the latest prototype of the 820 to Samsung to test in the Galaxy S7.
The latest version of the Snapdragon 820, which is 3.x, contains four custom Kyro cores, the Adreno 530 GPU, and is made with the 14nm FinFET manufacturing process courtesy of Samsung. It is already receiving better results than the Snapdragon 810 in both power consumption and thermal management. The 820 should reach clock speeds of up to 3.0 GHz, which would quite impressive for an octa-core processor.
According to the other reports, there will be two variants of the Galaxy S7, one that ships with the next-gen Exynos M1 processor and another that ships with the Snapdragon 820. If that’s the case, North America will probably see Qualcomm’s chipset whereas the international version will likely see Samsung’s Exynos chipset. This has been seen in the past, so it wouldn’t be surprising.
