Long-standing rumors over the past weeks have suggested that Samsung Electronics will launch two different versions of its upcoming flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7. While one of the variants is believed to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 SoC, the other one is said to come with Samsung’s in-house Exynos 8890 under the hood. Now the Exynos 8890, said to come with Samsung’s custom ‘Mongoose’ cores, have apparently already entered mass production if a report from earlier today is to be believed. Just the other day, reports circulating in the South Korean media also seemed to indicate that while Samsung will sell the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820-powered Galaxy S7 in the US and Chinese markets, the rest of the world, including the company’s home country of South Korea, will get the Exynos variant of the upcoming device.
The report had actually also went on to claim that the strict demarcation of which market gets which variant is less of a marketing decision and more of a strategic business decision from Samsung to win the Snapdragon 820 manufacturing contract from Qualcomm in the first place. According to the terms of the deal, Samsung was chosen by Qualcomm as its manufacturer of choice specifically with the understanding that the two largest smartphone markets on the planet, the US and China, will remain exclusively Qualcomm’s, without Samsung trying to force its way in with it’s Exynos-powered devices. It’s worth remembering of course, that it is Samsung and not TSMC, which is in charge of manufacturing Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line chipset this time around. Last year, it was TSMC which had won the contract to manufacture Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 SoC.
Now, a new report coming out of South Korea is claiming that contrary to previous rumors, Samsung will roll out its Galaxy S7 handsets at a ratio of 1:1 between the two different variants. Meaning, the number of Galaxy S7 handsets running the Qualcomm chipset will be roughly the same as the number of handsets running the Exynos chip if Samsung has its way. This is in direct contrast to earlier rumors that stated Samsung will look to push more Exynos-powered variants of the handset as opposed to the Snapdragon-powered ones. Although there’s no way of verifying any of the claims thus far, it would be interesting to see how Samsung actually goes about the whole process, seeing as the company completely ignored Qualcomm for all four of its 2015 flagship smartphones – the Galaxy S6, the Galaxy S6 Edge, the Note 5 and finally, the S6 Edge+.