Last month during Mobile World Congress, Samsung revealed its latest generation flagship smartphones – the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. These highly-anticipated flagship handsets captured the attention of not only the Congress attendees, but also of the world’s media. The sleek design, advanced camera functionality and IP68 water and dust resistance are just some of the headline grabbing details that have made these latest-generation Galaxy S series smartphones a ‘must have’ for tens of millions around the world.
And of course, for techies and phone geeks, an even more highly-anticipated event around these phone launches is the inevitable teardowns that quickly follow their release. In the case of the Galaxy S7, the teardowns took place even before their official release date of March 11th courtesy of some well-connected people who got their hands on the devices in advance of the launch and took great delight in tearing them apart!
These teardowns generally reveal a lot about the components inside the phones, how well designed the internals are and give an indication of how much each unit costs to construct. In the case of the S7 teardowns, it was revealed that there are two variants targeting different geographies – a version based on Samsung’s own Exynos 8890 SoC and a version based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 SoC.
Since Samsung introduced its own Shannon LTE modem in 2010, it’s been well documented that CEVA’s DSP technology is inside. In the following years, Samsung has significantly improved the performance and specification of their modem and for the first time in the Galaxy S7, the Exynos processor and the CEVA-powered Shannon Modem are integrated into a Single SoC, offering a similar solution in terms of apps processing and the LTE features to that of the Snapdragon 820.
But it doesn’t end there! Teardowns of the Snapdragon-based S7 revealed a very small and low power ‘always-on’ voice activation chip that sits alongside the Snapdragon to enable you to wake up the phone with a passphrase and ask it to perform tasks for you. This chip comes from our licensee DSP Group and is powered by our DSP technology.
So no matter which variant of the new Galaxy S7 series you are planning to buy, rest assured that the world’s leading DSP IP will be inside powering your experience!
Richard Kingston