Samsung and Qualcomm have worked together over the past years on many devices that are powered with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. Last week the tech giant Samsung said it will start the process of mass producing Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820 mobile processors. Samsung, using the exact same process to make its own Exynos 8 mobile chips, will start production on the Snapdragon 820 using 14-nanometre chip production technology. This is great news for Samsung seeing as it will power Samsung’s new Galaxy series, Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, and S7 Edge Plus, although the South Korean company did not reveal any benefit if any, the deal with Qualcomm will bring.
Samsung and Qualcomm have had an off and on relationship for quite some time now with Samsung’s phones having been put through a rigorous back and forth between processors. According to Wikipedia, in 2010 Samsung launched its first Galaxy phone which featured its licensed processor the ARM Cortex-A8 which was later called Exynos 3. The Galaxy S had many variants and some of which featured semi-related Snapdragon processors. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors can be found in many of Samsung’s smartphones and tablets. Devices like Samsung’s Galaxy TabPro, Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy S5 and S5 Active, and Samsung’s Galaxy Note Edge and Note 4 were all devices powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor.
Although there were many rumors last year surrounding why Samsung decided to drop Qualcomm from its last flagship devices and instead use their own built processors, Samsung and Qualcomm seemed to have hugged it out and are now working together again on Samsung’s latest flagship series. Qualcomm did seem to have some issues last year with their Snapdragon 810 processor overheating in some devices. Devices such as the HTC One M9 and LG’s G Flex 2 featured this processor. Qualcomm’s vice president of marketing Tim McDonough did say that these were just rumors although the LG G Flex 2 did illustrate overheating issues but was said to be a result of excessive thermal throttling. Tim McDonough did go on to say that most of these rumors were just from someone who wanted to fuel the flame and wanted to get a story out of it. Whatever the case may be Qualcomm’s issues were eventually settled and Samsung obviously agrees with it starting production shortly.