Snapdragon 830 ships to India for testing

We’ve said some days ago that Samsung has been chosen to manufacture Qualcomm’s upcoming quad-core Snapdragon 830 SoC (system-on-a-chip, processor), but prior to now, we’d only seen the upcoming processor label with little else to give credence to it. Of course, Reuters’ statement on the matter is something that, like the Wall Street Journal, can be taken seriously and trusted, but the tangible evidence is what I live for in the tech space. Fortunately, it hasn’t taken long for Indian import/export site Zauba to give us what is easily the most convincing evidence on the Snapdragon 830’s existence that you’ll see before it ends up in a high-end Android handset in 2017.

The Indian site Zauba has the Snapdragon 830 “with its hands in the cookie jar,” with the Qualcomm model number MSM8998 listed as a processor being shipped from the US to India (Bangalore Air Cargo is listed as the Port of Discharge on the document). Qualcomm is a US company, so this makes sense that the company would ship it to other places for testing — particularly if markets like India will end up utilizing the processor in upcoming mobile devices. Since Samsung will produce the Snapdragon 830, though, it appears as though the Qualcomm SoC will work for not only the US and China (Qualcomm’s largest world markets) but also India and other places where you’d assume Samsung would promote its Exynos processors. The MSM8998 processor appears to be the successor to the Snapdragon 820 (bearing model number MSM8996), and, seeing that the 830 is close in part number to the 820, this makes sense.

We know little else about the Snapdragon 830, except to say that we’re seeing specs on the import list such as UFS 2.0, 64GB of internal storage, and 4GB of DDR4 RAM (the latest DRAM on the market), specs indicative of high-end Android handsets and nothing in the mid to low-end category. Samsung has employed UFS 2.0 on the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, and Galaxy Note 7, as well as its 2015 Galaxy S6 series and Galaxy Note 5 handsets. The Galaxy Note 7, though, is the only high-end “Galaxy” in 2016 to have 64GB of internal storage — so it’s assumed that this new handset that will feature the Snapdragon 830 is none other than the Galaxy S8 (because the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge only have 32GB of internal storage). Since the Galaxy Note 7 has 64GB of storage internally, only the Galaxy S line remains to get a storage increase from 32GB to 64GB.

Lastly, we’ve been talking up Samsung’s decision to go with dual cameras in the Galaxy S8, and Qualcomm’s reference to its Clear Sight camera features in its Image Signal Processor (ISP) of the Snapdragon 820 along with Samsung’s dual camera trademark filings, gives credence to the idea. Dual camera capabilities are not necessarily possible with the current Snapdragon 820, and the Snapdragon 830 may enable dual camera software capabilities we can only imagine at this point.

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