New Samsung Galaxy variant spotted on Geekbench, could feature the Snapdragon 840

Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the smallest Galaxy of them all? (Source: CNet)

A new Samsung Galaxy variant, purportedly the Galaxy S8 'lite', has hit the Geekbench benchmarks list and interestingly, the device seems to feature an unannounced Snapdragon 840 chipset.

by Vaidyanathan Subramaniam, 2017/07/13

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While fans and the press in the general eagerly await the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 phablet, a new Galaxy variant is doing the rounds in the famed halls of benchmarking site, Geekbench. The new device carries the moniker SM-G9600 and reports say that this could be a 'lite' version of the Galaxy S8 flagship. The interesting part of the benchmark is the revelation of a new Snapdragon chipset. The benchmark refers to the motherboard as sdm840, which in all likelihood could be the Snapdragon 840 SoC.

The Snapdragon 840 apparently does not seem to be a spec upgrade from the current SD 835 chipset as it seems to feature only 4 cores clocked at 1.77GHz (the SD 835 is an octa-core clocked at 2.45GHz). It can also be observed from the benchmark reference that the processor ID is listed as "ARM implementer 81 architecture 8 variant 1 part 517 revision 2", which is the same as last year's flagship Qualcomm SoC, the Snapdragon 820. This means that the new chipset could be a custom modification to the original Snapdragon 820.

Apart from the CPU, the benchmark result reveals that the new device features upto 4GB of RAM and runs on Android 7.1.2 Nougat. Other details are pretty scarce so watch this space as we unfold the story.