Snapdragon 600 to power 70% of the first Galaxy S4 batch

Latest reports suggest Samsung will use Snapdragon 600 chips in 70% of the first Galaxy S4 batch. This was already confirmed by the leaked list showing the availability of the two Galaxy S4 versions around the globe.

In case you need a refresh, the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be sold in two flavors - the Exynos 5 Octa-powered I9500 and the Snapdragon 600-powered I9505. The "octa" units are reserved for Asia and Africa and few European countries that don't have wide LTE availability just yet.

According to the reports coming from Samsung's homeland, the company is having issues with the Exynos 5 Octa production and there was no chance for it to meet the tremendous demand of the flagship. So the Snapdragon 600 switch was necessary, and the reach of the I9505 model was expanded beyond the US borders to most of the developed markets.

We already met the Snapdragon 600-powered Galaxy S4 and it turned out to be the fastest phone currently available, so no one should worry about the performance of the device. It's a beast that easily outruns the competition. And we are yet to see how those four 1.6GHz Cortex-A15 cores within the Exynos 5 Octa chipset are doing compared to the four 1.9GHz Krait 300.

Samsung has already announced the Exynos 5 Octa chipset will enter mass production in Q2 this year, which probably suggest the octa-core Galaxy S4 will get wider availability in June or July.

Source | Via

US, Canada and Sweden getting Snapdragon 600 based Galaxy S4

The Samsung I9500 Galaxy S4 is the first smartphone with an octa-core processor or at least in some regions. As expected, the North American versions of the phone will use a Snapdragon chipset instead (a 600 to be precise).

So, both the US and Canada are getting quad Krait 300 cores and Adreno 320 GPU instead of Cortex-A15 / A7 CPU cores (four of each) and PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU.

We expected that version to only be available in North America and the European version to use the Exynos 5 Octa chipset. The Swedish site for major European carrier Tele2, however, lists the Samsung Galaxy S4 on pre-order with the Snapdragon 600 chipset. The prices start at SEK 220 (about $34) per month on contract.

That’s a bit disappointing, but the Qualcomm-designed chipset should still offer stellar performance – better than the competing flagships, which use the same chip but at lower frequency. Benchmarks point to great SunSpider performance – 822ms vs. 1124ms for the HTC One and 1336ms for the Sony Xperia Z.

AnTuTu scores indicated a relatively modest increase in overall performance of about 30% for a score of 21, 089 vs. 22,678 for the HTC One and 20,794 for the Xperia Z.

It remains to be seen what kind of performance the Exynos 5 Octa will offer – AnTuTu’s publicly available benchmark doesn’t support the chipset and the scores the AnTuTu team posted from in-house testing can’t be compared to the old benchmarks.

You can check out our hands-on impressions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 over here.

Source 1 • Source 2 • Source 3 | Via (in Swedish)