Hacker News Reader

Comment by fpgeek | Hacker News Reader

Um, what? Yes, the ARMv8 transition was a problem, but until then, Qualcomm had been consistently delivering the best combination of power and performance all the way back to the Snapdragon S4. It's not like Samsung was putting Qualcomm chips in their flagships because they wanted to - they had to in order to keep them competitive.

View on HN

Samsung didn't have an integrated LTE solution. This caused battery life issues. Also, patents.

Not really. They had to due to patents for LTE in USA.

Yes, they had to pay Qualcomm for their LTE patents, but that didn't mean they had to use Qualcomm SoCs.

Other devices (e.g. Galaxy Nexus, Droid Bionic, HTC One X+) married Qualcomm LTE radios with non-Qualcomm SoCs. Even Samsung did this for a few devices (e.g. Galaxy Note and Note 2 LTE, a few S2 and S3 variants), but, until this year, that was a small and shrinking portion of their lineup.

Qualcomm's past engineering success was a big part of the reason why. Samsung/ARM's engineering failures (e.g. big.LITTLE and cache coherency issues with the original Exynos Octa) were the another part of the reason, but I don't think that changes the overall picture.

I call this BS sorry. I do not know the exact reason why samsung had to release the previous phones using qualcomm's cpus but it was not because snapdragon 805 was a better chip. Quite the opposite if you check the benchmarks for snapdragon vs exynos. Exynos wins not by a higher margin but still wins.

Snapdragon 800 was a better chip than the A15-based Exynos: http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/159152-qualcomm-snapdragon....

> Other devices (e.g. Galaxy Nexus, Droid Bionic, HTC One X+) married Qualcomm LTE radios with non-Qualcomm SoCs

The Verizon Galaxy Nexus and Droid Charge (both made by Samsung) actually didn't use any Qualcomm chips. Samsung baseband for LTE and VIA Telecom for 3GPP2 (1XRTT/EVDO). http://www.anandtech.com/show/4465/samsung-droid-charge-revi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com