Update: As we had expected, the US will not be getting the Exynos variant of the Galaxy Note 10 at all. Evleaks, who had earlier said the Exynos 9825 model might come to all major carriers except Verizon, has now backtracked and says “US devices will have SD855 across the board.”

Original story follows

The latest Galaxy Note 10 rumor from the Twitterverse says Samsung’s upcoming flagship may be equipped with its in-house Exynos chip in the US. Other than the year 2015, which saw Samsung use its Exynos SoC in every market, the company has used both Exynos and Snapdragon chips for all of its flagships, with the latter usually making its way to the US, Japan, and China. However, Samsung is apparently going to use the Exynos 9825 inside the Galaxy Note 10 for all carriers in the US except for Verizon.

There never has been a clear answer to why Samsung continues to put Qualcomm’s SoCs inside its flagship phones for the aforementioned markets. It’s said to be because of the old CDMA technology still in use in those countries for 2G and 3G networks and the poorer CDMA performance on the modems used inside Exynos chips. Stateside, Verizon and Sprint continue to employ CDMA technology, but all major North American carriers are gearing up to drop support for 2G and 3G networks in the next year or two and shift to exclusively 4G and 5G networks.

That means Samsung may not need to keep its Exynos SoCs outside the country for much longer, and it could start making inroads with the Galaxy Note 10 later this year. Perhaps the company could have done it with the Galaxy S10 as well if the Exynos 9820 had been built on a 7nm fabrication process like the Snapdragon 855, but that was not the case. The Exynos 9825, however, will be a 7nm chip and should be able to theoretically match the SD855 in both performance and efficiency.

All of this is just a rumor for now, so we will have to wait and see if Samsung is indeed replacing the Snapdragon 855 with the Exynos 9825 on the Galaxy Note 10. The same source had earlier said Samsung might use the Snapdragon 855+ in the country but has now been told there’s the regular 855 inside the Note 10, so it’s best to keep the proverbial grain of salt handy until everything’s been officially revealed.