Samsung to Drop Snapdragon from Galaxy S6 Handset

With the next Mobile World Congress scheduled to kick off in Barcelona in early March, details are swirling about the next batch of flagship phones that are slated to come out from the major mobile players. And despite Samsung’s recent woes in the mobile field, the company still represents the face of Android to the world at large – and news hit this week that the company plans on dumping Qualcomm’s ubiquitous Snapdragon processor from the upcoming Galaxy S6 in favor of a chip of its own design.

According to a report from Bloomberg from Monday, Samsung insiders have said that the company will use its own CPUs in the S6 – in fact, they will be Samsung’s “most advanced chips.” Meanwhile, Qualcomm has supplied Samsung with chips for its smartphones for years, and this news immediately led to a 1.2 percent drop in Qualcomm’s share values.

It isn’t immediately clear as to why Samsung is eschewing Qualcomm’s chips in its upcoming flagship – if this report is to be believed, of course. However, Samsung has been making a habit of trying to get away from any kind of dependence on other companies to make its products work. For instance, with the exception of one single device, every other smartwatch produced by Samsung runs on Tizen, its homegrown operating system. Furthermore, Samsung finally released its long-awaited first Tizen-based smartphone in India.

Both of those focuses on Tizen represent Samsung’s desire to lessen its dependence on Google and its Android ecosystem. The reason, of course, is that Samsung wants to earn money on app sales, and can do so if it holds the purse strings on whatever operating system is being used on a particular device.

However, that logic doesn’t quite apply to dropping Qualcomm, unless it’s simply a cost-cutting measure. After all, Samsung can use its own CPUs and pay production costs for them. As long as that costs less than whatever prices Qualcomm would provide, it’s a solid financial move. The real question, then, is whether or not Samsung’s CPUs can outperform Qualcomm’s. The Snapdragon processor is found in huge amount of smartphones across the board, so if Samsung has figured out how to beat one of the industry leaders, it might turn its mobile luck around with the Galaxy S6.

[Source: Bloomberg]