Qualcomm hasn’t had the best 2015. And the biggest reason for this is Samsung pulling their business from Qualcomm. This year marked the first year that Samsung used their Exynos chip in both their Galaxy S and Galaxy Note flagships all around the world. Now there have been other models that have had only Exynos-variants, but not for both. For example, the Galaxy Note 2 used Exynos in LTE and 3G markets, and so did the Galaxy S2. Outside of those two models, they’ve all been Exynos in 3G markets and Qualcomm Snapdragon in LTE markets. Samsung has cited their reason for using the Exynos 7420 around the world this time because the Snapdragon 810 was overheating. And I think we have sufficient proof of that.
Samsung is notably Qualcomm’s biggest customer. As you probably already knew. And losing them really put a hurting on their financial report and earnings. Qualcomm wants Samsung back, obviously. And it looks like they are attempting to do that now. There’s a report out this morning, that Samsung is testing out the Snapdragon 820 internally. Qualcomm has already made the Snapdragon 820 available to manufacturers to start sampling the new processor, with the mass production beginning later this year. Now what that means is that smartphones and tablets with the Snapdragon 820 won’t be available until Q1 2016 if not later on.
There have been rumors floating around about the Galaxy S7 and that it would sport the Snapdragon 820 inside. It appears that is not set in stone yet, but could still be a possibility for early 2016. It’s hard to say whether the Snapdragon 820 will be cooler than the Snapdragon 810, but I’m sure Qualcomm is hoping so. It’ll still be an octa-core 64-bit processor, so pretty powerful.
The Galaxy S7 isn’t slated to be announced until March of next year, so there’s still plenty of time for Sammy to test the processor and make sure it’s up to their standards. Or to decide to stick with their Exynos processor. Which this year, it has shown that is plenty powerful in both the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 5. So customers need not worry about performance when it comes to Exynos.