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Looks like some recent rumors about Samsung ditching the Snapdragon 810 in the Samsung galaxy S6 are starting to grow some strong legs. Qualcomm today announced that more than 60 devices with the latest Snapdragon 810 chipset are in the works in a move likely made to combat murmurings that manufacturers are having overheating problems with the chip.
They name-dropped some of the devices we already know about such as the LG G Flex 2 and the Xiaomi Mi Note, so no surprise there. But they even confirmed forthcoming Snapdragon 810 devices from companies who haven’t made formal announcements yet.
Sony Mobile senior vice president Gen Tsuchikawa, Motorola Mobility president Rick Osterloh and Oppo vice president Sky Li all submitted their typical feel-good words for inclusion in the press release and noted their intention to stuff Snapdragon 810 inside at least one of their smartphones this year.
Notice one big name not on this list? Samsung — the biggest Android manufacturer — doesn’t have a single mention here. We can’t say for sure that this confirms the aforementioned rumors (in fact, another report suggested Samsung was getting a special version of the chipset), but it sure doesn’t help.
It should be mentioned that HTC is also notably missing from the press release, and they’re rumored to be using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 for the upcoming HTC One M9 (Hima). They also don’t have the luxury of using their own chipset so it’s unlikely HTC will be going with anything else.
Either Samsung’s really looking to ditch Qualcomm for the Samsung Galaxy S6 (Qualcomm confirmed that they lost the business of a huge partner, which in turn made their stock take an epic nose dive) or we’re all being thrown for a loop. Good thing the company just scheduled a March 1st press event to put all the uncertainty to rest.
Samsung’s intention is ditching Snapgragon SoCs and give more priority for their in-house Exynos SoCs. The Exynos 5430 and 5433 are good as SD 801 and 805 SoCs. Samsung’s Exynos chips are great and I don’t see anything wrong if Samsung used the Exynos 7420 instead of the SD 810 for the Galaxy S6.
There is no rule that OEMs should buy chips from only a one specific supplier. The smartphone industry is better off without a monopoly. A healthy competition is a win-win situation for both OEMs and us.
The plain truth is Samsung’s competitors won’t use Exynos chips for their flagships even though they are better than the Snapdragon chips.
the problem with the exynos chips is only here in the US. Samsung has been using the exynos chips in the other variants for some time now. The reason they werent using it in the US is because it doesnt play nice with LTE. Qualcomm had LTE integrated into their chip so it wasnt a battery hog. Lets hope samsung has made the improvements before this chip hits the market wide open.
Right, Qualcomm has LTE integration but is Exynos GPU better than Snap 810?
I guess that remains to be seen.
The problem with Exynos is poor developer support.
Is development still dead on Exynos SoC though? I know for a while CM and others weren’t developing on any device with Exynos. That was a while ago, so I’m not sure if that is still the case.
Ya they are.
Not that it matters on any NA devices though. Those things will be locked down like well….Ft Knox. :-)
figure we can only push thing so far before active cooling is required