Samsung considers returning to Qualcomm chips if the performance limitations and heating issues from the previous version will be address properly.
A recent leak from the Chinese microblogging website Weibo suggests that Samsung is currently testing two variants of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 in the Samsung Galaxy S7. The leaked showed a chart with orange and red stripes, where orange column is 820-A and the red column being 820-B. The chart came from the benchmark in AnTuTu, suggesting that Snapdragon 820 performance has improved considerably all around for the prototype devices.
It suggest that 820-A is an older version of the Snapdragon 820 platform and the 820-B version offers 1.77x improvement in performance. Perhaps the most important improvement of all is that the latest 820 does not overheat as easily as the older version, which became the major problem of Samsung from using Qualcomm chips, according to 9to5Goggle.
It was the major factor that lead Samsung to decide using with its own Exynos 7420 chip in all models of the Samsung Galaxy S6 device globally.
However, it is still early to say that Samsung will completely go back to Snapdragon for their upcoming Galaxy S7. If the old issues will be addressed properly, Samsung may get a better performance results from Qualcomm’s chips compared to its own processor.
The South Korean tech giant is not the only company that currently testing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chip. Sony, HTC, LG, Xiaomi and ZTE are among the mobile vendors that want to know the performance of the Qualcomm’s processor, iDigitalTimes reported.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm announced last week that its upcoming Snapdragon 820 has X12 LTE modem built-in,offering up to 600Mbps Cat 12 LTE downlink speeds.
Galaxy S7 may possibly come in two size variants, a 5.2-inch model and a 5.8-inch model. It is also expected that it will feature 3GB of RAM and a 20-MP ISOCELL camera.