Samsung Galaxy S4 to ship with Snapdragon 600 in the UK

Samsung has already confirmed the Galaxy S4 flagship will ship with Snapdragon 600 chipset in the USA, Canada and Sweden. Today the UK joins the markets where the Galaxy S4 won't be powered by the company's own Exynos 5 Octa platform.

Since its announcement we knew Samsung Galaxy S4 will be available in two flavors - one running on Samsung's latest and greatest Exynos 5 Octa chipset and another based on the Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 platform.

The Exynos 5 Octa chipset features two processors (which can't operate simultaneously) - a quad-core 1.6GHz ARM Cortex-A15 CPU used for heavier loads and a quad-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A7 CPU for lighter tasks. The Exynos 5 Octa also features a tri-core PowerVR SGX544MP3 graphics.

The Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 chipset is already available on the market and utilized by a few smartphones out there. It comes with a quad-core Krait 300 processor and Adreno 320 graphics. In the Galaxy S4 models to use it, the four Krait 300 cores are clocked at 1.9GHz and as we saw in our preview that was enough to beat every other phone we've tested so far.

Still we expect the four Cortex-A15 cores to do even better and beat those four Krait 300 cores.

We suspect the LTE-enabled Galaxy S4 model (I9505) is the one based on the Snapdragon 600 chipset, while the Exynos 5 Octa one (I9500) won't feature LTE connectivity. That's probably why those key markets (USA, Canada, UK) are getting the Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S4 - because of the LTE availability in those countries.

Do you find this is a fair trade (LTE for inferior CPU) or would you rather get the Octa core version? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Source 1 | Source 2