Near the end of last year there was a lot of drama pertaining to Qualcomm’s latest chipset, the Snapdragon 810. For years now Qualcomm has ruled the mobile processor roost and have provided not just fast chipsets that eclipsed the speeds of everyone else’s, but also delivered more efficient chips with more features than competitors as well. As such there were a lot of hopes and dreams being laid at the feet of Qualcomm for the Snapdragon 810, and for better or worse it seems this might be the least favorable Qualcomm chipsets in many years. Samsung made the decision to move away from Qualcomm with the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge for a number of reasons, but the most likely was of course that it wants to keep as much of the manufacturing process in-house as possible.
The Exynos 7420 is a beast of a chipset no matter how you cut it. It’s 20-30% more efficient than previous generation chips, and it’s also quite a bit faster as well. Many thought that the chipset was the only thing Samsung switched out, but we’re finding out via the usual breakdown reports that there are more Samsung chips in the Galaxy S6 than any other phone on the market. Besides the obvious Exynos chipset that powers the heart of the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, it looks like Samsung also switched out the WiFi module and LTE modem as well. The Samsung Shannon 333 modem powers the mobile signal no matter what carrier you buy the phone on, which is a big change from previous Samsung phones that used Qualcomm modems.
In addition to this Samsung is once again returning with a Wolfson audio chip, specifically the WM1840, which has been known to produce some of the finest audio in the mobile industry. As you would imagine the rest of the list is completely devoid of anything Qualcomm related, with names like Texas Instruments, Avago, Maxim and Broadcom all making the cut instead. At this rate it wouldn’t be surprising to see Samsung eschew even more chip manufacturers next time around to shrnk the list of non-Samsung components even further. There’s certainly a reason Samsung thinks this is the best phone they’ve ever made. That definitely seems to be true in every way, and it’s probably because this is the most tightly controlled phone Samsung has ever built.