Qualcomm has been having a rough year as their most powerful processor, the Snapdragon 810, had some issues handling its temperature in some handsets. Not only that, but its performance wasn’t quite what everyone expected from the flagship processor of the company. This might have been the reason why Samsung chose to use one of their in-house built processors in their flagships this year, and the Exynos 7420 actually turned out to be one of the most powerful processors this year. Now, Qualcomm has announced their most recent flagship processor, the Snapdragon 820, which will supposedly have a better control of the temperature and many performance improvements.
Some companies have been teasing some new devices that will use the Snapdragon 820 and it is believed that Xiaomi’s Mi5 could be among the first devices to use this processor as the CEO mentioned that they wanted to bring the best experience with this handset rather than releasing it a little sooner. A new rumor was spotted on China’s social network Weibo, and it suggests that Samsung will be the only company to release devices with the Snapdragon 820 before April 2016. If this turns out to be true, the Galaxy S7 would be the first smartphone to be powered by the aforementioned processor. We still don’t know when the company plans to release their new flagship phone, but it is believed that it will be announced at the MWC 2016 in late February, so it would probably be available in March.
When the overheating rumors of the Snapdragon 810 started, it was said that Qualcomm could modify their processor to work on Samsung’s devices, which created some controversy with the other companies that were already integrating this processor in their handsets. If the rumor is true, it would delay new flagship phones from the rest of the companies, which would certainly won’t make them very happy. Still, the Snapdragon 820 processor is being built in Samsung’s facilities under a 14 nm FinFET process, so the company might as well have some privileges, it was reported that Samsung has already been testing the processor in their next flagship to ensure that it doesn’t overheat. These are only rumors for now, so we will have to wait for some official confirmation.