Samsung testing Snapdragon 820 in Galaxy S7 according to leaked benchmarks

Samsung caused a lot of chatter in the tech scene when it decided to eschew Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips in favor of its own Exynos processors this year. All four of Samsung’s high end devices feature its own processor in every market worldwide. But that could change next year. According to a few leaks posted to Chinese social network, weibo, Qualcomm has sent a few different versions of its Snapdragon 820 processor to Samsung for testing in its Galaxy S7.

Results shown indicate a noticeable performance jump versus the current generation Snapdragon 810 in most benchmarking tests. As revealed by Android Pit, the chart below shows green, yellow and red bars for the Snapdragon 810, 820-A and 820-B respectively. For background, the 820-A and 820-B are the first two revisions of the 820. Samsung will purportedly receive the third revision at some point in the next month.

Perhaps more importantly than benchmark speed improvements, the 820 also doesn’t overheat as easily as the 810, an issue which was allegedly the major point of contention for Samsung and Qualcomm. It was this factor which essentially lead to Sammy deciding to go with its own processors globally.

While it’s far too early to say if Samsung will ship the Galaxy S7 with a Snapdragon processor inside, it’s a promising sign to see the company rumored to be — at the very least — testing the chip. If testing is successful, and Samsung gets better performance results from Qualcomm’s chips than from its own, there’s no reason why the Snapdragon-powered Galaxy flagships can’t return next year.