Rumor: The Galaxy S7 to be the first-ever Snapdragon 820-equipped smartphone

Let's start with an interesting reminder – when early reports about the Snapdragon 810's overheating and throttling issues first surfaced last year, Samsung was quick to decide to build its Galaxy S6 and S6 edge flagships with its own, home-made Exynos 7420 processor under their hoods. One may think that this would put the relationship between Sammy and Qualcomm on rocky ground, but it seems quite the opposite has happened. Recent reports say that the new Snapdragon 820 is not only going to be the beating heart under the Galaxy S7's chest (or at least half of the Galaxy S7s in the world), but the SoC has also been developed in partnership with Samsung, employing its 14 nm LPP process to achieve high performance and power efficiency.

It seems that the bond between the two companies is even stronger than it initially appeared, as a very recent rumor, coming from a leakster profile on Chinese social media site Weibo, claims that the first Snapdragon 820-equipped smartphone that will be launched commercially will be a Samsung. Other brand handsets with the latest and greatest Qualcomm SoC will not hit store shelves before April, the rumor says.

The aforementioned piece of information is posted in the context of anticipation for the Xiaomi Mi 5, which is expected to be another Snapdragon 820-equipped smartphone. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun took to social media earlier, saying the company will not try and race to be among the first to launch a handset with the new SoC — but it seems that's a doomed effort in the first place. Through the kind-of-broken Google and Bing translations of the Weibo post we mentioned earlier, it looks like Sammy has been promised the first Snapdragon 820 units for its Galaxy S7 flagship. Sounds about right, considering that Samsung lent its own tech towards the creation of the new chips, one would expect that the company would be the first one to get to sell devices equipped with them.

Thanks for the tip!