There’s a lot of talk at this point every year about the next in line Samsung flagship. This time around, we’re looking at the Galaxy S6 which is expected to go official within the next two months or so. If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’d know that the phone was initially expected to feature the Snapdragon 810 powerhouse, but thanks to an overheating problem that has been delaying production, the Galaxy S6 would drop the SoC. People have had their opinions on this, but most recent ones from industry insiders seem to point at the unlikelihood of Samsung actually giving the Snapdragon 810 a ditch.
Analyst Tim Long of BMO Capital Markets believes Samsung wouldn’t switch to an in-house chip instead of the Snapdragon 810, and he has a simple reason backing his statement. Long says that the share of Exynos processors powering Samsung phones went down to just 20% in 2014 from the massive 70% in 2012, which goes to show what Samsung is really looking at for the future. And if you ask me, what Long says makes total sense; it wouldn’t be wise to again switch back to Exynos, and in the process, lose Qualcomm’s favour.
Another industry analyst, namely Timothy Arcuri of Cowen, feels that Qualcomm has already fixed the overheating problems on the Snapdragon 810, and that the chip is about 2-3 months behind schedule. The analyst also categorically mentions that Samsung jumping back to Exynos for all of the Galaxy S6 variants isn’t very likely. “We consider this unlikely,” he mentions. Arcuri also goes on to add that Samsung could launch the Galaxy S6 in the Exynos flavour for its home market of Korea, and wait a couple of months till Qualcomm gets its production steady to launch the Galaxy S6 with the Snapdragon 810 in all other markets worldwide.
Given the current popularity of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets (and the 3rd party support that comes along), we believe it wouldn’t be a great move by Samsung to launch the Galaxy S6 only in Exynos. With not a lot of time to go before the launch, we thankfully don’t have to wait too much before we know it all!