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Report claims Samsung modifying Snapdragon 820 for Galaxy S7 due to ‘heat problems’

A new report from Business Korea has a striking air of familiarity about it. According to the site’s sources, Samsung is working hard to ‘stabilize’ Qualcomm’s next generation Snapdragon 820 processor. Samsung is purportedly modifying the processor’s control program to deal with its ‘heat problems’. If that doesn’t work, it will build a radiating pipe in to its next flagship phones to stop the processor from overheating…

The news seems familiar because it’s virtually identical to the issues the Korean company had with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processors last year. In the end, Samsung decided not to use the SD810 in any of its high-end Android phones for 2015. But that’s seemingly not a viable option with the Galaxy S7, which we’re expecting to see hit the market towards the beginning of next year. Business Korea‘s sources claim that they will use the Snapdragon 820 processor in the GS7 “at all costs”, because Samsung itself is rumored to be building the chips to Qualcomm’s specification on its own assembly lines.

Samsung has allegedly tested at least two different versions of the Snapdragon 820 processor and intends to use the chipset primarily in the US and China. The chip itself will be the first one with Qualcomm’s hard-wired malware protection built in and reportedly boost camera and battery performance.

If Samsung successfully manages the heat dissipation from the next high-end chip, it will undoubtedly see an upturn in fortune for Qualcomm, a company which has struggled to deal with the rise of inexpensive processors. Not long ago, the market leading processor-maker announced it would have to cut expenditure by as much as $1.4 billion and downsize its workforce in order to cope with its new financial struggle.

While Samsung will probably be the first to use the Snapdragon 820, several other big-name manufacturers like LG and HTC are also likely to use it in their new top-tier smartphones from the first quarter of 2016.

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