According to the folks over at WinFuture, the Galaxy Note 10's Snapdragon variant for markets like the US and China will be powered by the same Snapdragon 855 SoC that powers the Galaxy S10 lineup, not the Snapdragon 855 Plus that Qualcomm unveiled earlier this week. Like so many Galaxy Note 10 rumors and details that have surfaced online, this new bit of information doesn't come as a big surprise, and there are a couple of reasons for that.
First off, the Snapdragon 855 Plus has only just been made official, so it will be a few months before devices that are powered by the new chip hit the market. The Asus ROG Phone II is set to be the first smartphone with the 855 Plus under the hood, and Qualcomm says other devices powered by the chip will arrive by the end of this year. But with the Galaxy Note 10 expected to go on sale in late August, Samsung probably has mass production of its next flagship underway, and that means the company will have already obtained Snapdragon 855 chips from Qualcomm.
Then there's the fact that Samsung would want to use the regular Snapdragon 855 chip. The Exynos 9820 that powers the Galaxy S10 lineup lags behind the Snapdragon 855 in both performance and power efficiency, as a result of the 9820 being built on an 8 nm fabrication process while the Snapdragon 855 is built on a 7 nm process. It's only natural that Samsung will want to equalize things a bit with the Note 10 and the Exynos 9825 processor. The latter is the company's first 7 nm mobile chipset and will theoretically have at least better efficiency than the Exynos 9820.
Snapdragon 855 Plus is not a major upgrade over the regular 855
It's also worth noting that the Snapdragon 855 Plus is not a huge upgrade over the regular 855. The Plus iteration is focused on increased GPU performance, with Qualcomm touting a 15% increase over the Snapdragon 855. The CPU clock speed has gone up marginally from 2.84 GHz to 2.96 GHz, and that's about it. The 855 Plus should be a great fit for something like the Asus ROG Phone, which is all about the gaming experience, but overall, there's precious little it offers over the already excellent Snapdragon 855.
