We have definitely seen our fair share of rumors concerning the next flagship from South Korean smartphone powerhouse Samsung, where among them include a bumper case, launching with 5G Wi-Fi, and a March 14th release date to name a few. Well, a rather interesting report from South Korea has just appeared, touting that Samsung’s Exynos 5 octa-core processor has run into production issues, and that this is serious. In fact, it would be the reason why Samsung has not closed the door on Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs to be in the innards of their upcoming Galaxy S4 smartphone.
We are not quite sure just how true this particular report from South Korea is, and whether it might actually see Samsung ditch the entire Exynos 5 effort from their future devices, but we guess there is always the Great Teacher (some say Great Destroyer), Time, to show us the way. I do suppose that executives over at Qualcomm must be singing, “Happy days are here again…”, keeping their fingers crossed that Samsung will fail with the Exynos 5.
Publisher’s note: while this is a post discussing the alleged Exynos production issues, it is worth nothing that it is very unlikely that Samsung would “ditch” it altogether. While production issues often happen early in a chip’s life cycle, most of those problems are worked out and given that Samsung has already demonstrated working samples, the chip logic (design) seems out of danger. Now, the question is whether or not Samsung can produce enough of these chips to meet demand.