Wednesday 27 January 2016

Samsung Galaxy S7 may not give you the power you're owed

The Samsung Galaxy S7 might not be as speedy as we've been led to believe.

Previous leaks of the upcoming smartphone phone have shown it running the Exynos 8890 processor, but it seems that some territories, including ours, will be getting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset.

The Snapdragon 820 is the latest high-power chip from Qualcomm and will likely only feature in the European and US versions of the phone, while the Exynos will go to other markets such as Asia.

However, the latest benchmarking directly from GeekBench 3 suggests western territories may get the rough end of the deal as the Snapdragon is the less powerful processor of the two.

Slooow down

The Galaxy S7 with the Snapdragon 820 has been benchmarked at 2282 single core and 4979 multi-core.

That's quite a step forward from the Galaxy S6, which offered 4500 in our multi-core tests. That phone ran the Exynos 7420 chipset, but it doesn't match what we know the Snapdragon 820 is capable of.

Previous benchmarking results of Qualcomm's latest chip reached the heights of 2320 and 5369 on a multi-core test, so it's a little disappointing that the Galaxy S7 isn't breaking the 5000 mark.

That said, these tests could have been done on a prototype device that hasn't been fully optimised. There's no real way of telling until we get a physical Galaxy S7 in our hands and can run the tests for ourselves.

All the rumours point toward a Mobile World Congress announcement, which takes place at the end of February this year. Maybe we'll even have one ready for the test by the start of March.