According to SamMobile (via GSM Arena), Samsung (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF) is reportedly testing an enhanced version of its Galaxy Note 4 phone on "three major South Korea mobile carriers." This variant of the phone will, instead of either the Qualcomm (QCOM 4.42%) Snapdragon 805 or the Samsung-designed Exynos 7 Octa, reportedly feature Qualcomm's latest-and-greatest Snapdragon 810 processor.
Significantly more impressive than the current Snapdragon 805 model
Samsung's premium smartphone lineups can get a little confusing. The North American variants will usually feature Qualcomm applications processors and cellular basebands (either integrated or discrete), while international variants will often feature Samsung-designed applications processors with modems from other vendors such as Samsung itself, Intel (INTC 2.75%), and others.
In this case, the Snapdragon 810 variant of the Galaxy Note 4 should be meaningfully more powerful and efficient than the variants out there with a Snapdragon 805 paired with a stand-alone Qualcomm MDM9x35 modem. This is for a number of reasons:
- The Snapdragon 810 is built on a more power efficient 20-nanometer manufacturing technology, as opposed to the 28-nanometer used for the Snapdragon 805 applications processor
- While the integrated modem in the Snapdragon 810 is built on the same 20-nanometer technology as the stand-alone MDM9x35 modem in the current Qualcomm-based Note 4 models, the 810's integrated modem supports faster LTE speeds than the stand-alone MDM9x35
- The Snapdragon 810 supports hardware HEVC encoding and decoding (the 805 does not), has a faster graphics processor, more robust camera functionality, and more.
A Snapdragon 810-based Samsung Galaxy Note 4 would be quite an impressive upgrade from the Snapdragon 805 based model currently available for sale.
What about the Exynos models?
While a Snapdragon 810 Galaxy Note 4 would obviously be more advanced than the Snapdragon 805 variant, the question becomes more nuanced when we try to compare such a device to the Exynos-based Note 4 available today.
The 20-nanometer Exynos 7 Octa featured inside of some variants of the Note 4 features an octa-core Cortex A57/Cortex A53 CPU configuration similar to what Qualcomm will be bringing with the Snapdragon 810. The Exynos 7 Octa features ARM's (ARMH +0.00%) Mali-T760 graphics, which according to performance tests from PhoneArena actually slightly underperforms the Snapdragon 805 in a number of 3D benchmarks.
The Exynos chip does not feature an integrated cellular modem, and is paired with either Samsung's own Exynos Modem 303 or Intel's XMM 7260 -- both of which I believe are 28-nanometer parts. The Exynos 7 Octa, according to Samsung's site, features support for HEVC video playback (no word on capture); the Snapdragon has both 4K HEVC playback and capture support.
From a chip perspective, based on the public information available today, I conclude that while Samsung's Exynos 7 Octa is in a number of ways more impressive than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805, the Snapdragon 810 should be a more advanced part. This could potentially translate into the Snapdragon 810-based Galaxy Note 4 being more impressive than the best Exynos-based Note 4 models available today.
