North American Samsung Galaxy S3 could come with Qualcomm S4 chip to ensure LTE support

Well, this is a bit of a twist. The international version of the Galaxy S3 is almost ensured to have a quad-core Exynos 4212 SoC inside it, providing double the processing chops and 20% less power consumption than its predecessor. But we’re getting word that, in order to appease North American carriers pushing LTE, our variety could come with a Snapdragon S4 processor, the same as the one in the HTC One X.

This makes a lot of sense — we haven’t heard anything about the Exynos 4 Quad being compatible with LTE, and Samsung swapped out its Exynos for a Snapdragon S3 chip in the LTE-capable Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II LTE last year. And while the dual-core Snapdragon S4 is a beast of a chip and would have no problem making the Galaxy S3 scream, it’s disappointing that Canadians will potentially miss out on that quad-core goodness.

As we learned with the One X and its Tegra 3-powered international version, there are both pluses and minuses to having a dual-core chip. In the case of the S4, it excels at CPU-intensive tasks but lags behind its quad-core brethren in gaming performance.

Would you be happy with a Galaxy S3 if it came with a dual-core Snapdragon S4 chip, or will you try to import the international quad-core version even if it doesn’t have LTE?

Source: Android Central