Samsung Won’t Give Up On Snapdragon 810 Easily [Analysts]

Rumors are circulating these days that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 is facing overheating issues. Now this is a chip that’s supposed to power majority of the flagship smartphones that are due in 2015 so a delay of any kind would throw off release schedules for some of the biggest manufacturers. Samsung Galaxy S6 is expected to be powered by Snapdragon 810 but a recent report claimed the company is going to ditch this processor in favor of its own Exynos chips. Not so fast, say analysts.

In a new note Cowen analyst Timothy Arcuri writes their work has shown that Snapdragon 810’s overheating issue existed at the base layers, not metal, like various reports had claimed so this will only delay Snapdragon production by up to 3 months.

Arcuri believes that Qualcomm has already fixed the issue so the only thing that manufacturers now have to do is compensate for the production delay.

He says that its “UNLIKELY” for Samsung to shift all Galaxy S6 models to its Exynos processors but does say that the company might release Galaxy S6 in South Korea first with Exynos and then delay release in other markets so that Qualcomm’s chip can be used.

BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long points towards the decline in Samsung’s internal share of Exynos usage that declined from 70 percent in 2012 to 20 percent last year. Long believes it is not possible for Samsung to immediately reverse this share decline in time to meet its intended Galaxy S6 timeframe.

Samsung is expected to unveil the Galaxy S6 on March 2nd. Only at the event will we know what course the company is actually taking.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Galaxy S6, Qualcomm, Snapdragon 810