Listen, we get it: it’s cold outside, and when you walk down the street, the wind howls at you, tearing into your exposed face like so many tiny cuts. You get on the streetcar or bus, or perhaps you walk, and as you do you open your favourite news app and tap on your favourite tech site and, boom, you see this proverbial jackpot of new info: “Canadian Samsung Galaxy S7 unit Geekbench’d with Exynos 8 Octa chipset“. It’s pretty enticing; hell, I’d probably click on it. (Actually, I did, which is why you’re reading this.)
In the doldrums between CES and Mobile World Congress, we grasp at these rumours like so much extra poutine, devouring it before it’s had time to cool. Some of it burns our throat; some of it makes us sick.
This leads us to the particular piece of information in front of us. The Canadian variant of the upcoming Galaxy S7 was reportedly benchmarked using the popular Geekbench app, the summary of which was uploaded to the company’s numbers-heavy website sometimes in the last few days. Perhaps it was a mistake; perhaps a plant. Perhaps nothing matters.
First, how do we know that it was the Canadian variant that was uploaded? Well, based on the model numbers for previous Galaxies released in this country — SM-G900W8 for the Galaxy S5; SM-G920W8 for the Galaxy S6 — one can infer that the SM-G930W8 will be the Canadian Galaxy S7. That is, the base Galaxy S7; Evan Blass, known to the world as @evleaks, recently posited that Samsung will announce no fewer than three S7 variants at Mobile World Congress, the S7, S7 edge and S7 edge+.
Either way, looking at these completely unconfirmed benchmarks, it appears that the Canadian Galaxy S7 will sport Samsung’s shiny new Exynos 8890 SoC, which features a big.LITTLE core setup with custom Cortex-A72 cores running at 1.6Ghz, along with four gigabytes of LPDDR4 RAM. It may also ship with Android 6.0.1.
It’s unclear whether Samsung will use Qualcomm’s spritely Snapdragon 820 chip for some of its Galaxy S7 variants, but the company can probably rest easy knowing that its Exynos 7420 walloped Qualcomm’s former flagship chip, the Snapdragon 810, in nearly every category in 2015.
All synthetic benchmarks must be taken with a grain of salt, since they’re often not indicative of real-world performance. These benchmarks must be taken with a thick paste of that same sodium chloride, since not only has the Galaxy S7 not been announced, but the Exynos 8890 is still considered pre-production.
That said, these scores indicate a 39 percent improvement in single-core performance over the 7420 and a 29 percent boost in multi-core speeds. Of particular note are the improvements to memory speed, which likely means Samsung has either widened the memory bus or is using a faster DDR4 variant than the Galaxy S6.
It should be no surprise that the Galaxy S7 will be faster than its immediate predecessor, itself still one of the fastest devices on the market. What will be more interesting is seeing how Samsung evolves the company’s new metal-and-glass design language.
TL;DR: Of course the Galaxy S7 is coming to Canada.
