[Galaxy S 4 General] Shammyh:
Yes, I think they will continue to ship the Snapdragon variant even after (if) the Exynos Octa hits mass production.

First of all, Samsung Semiconductor is very busy (not be confused with Samsung Electronics). They make a lot more than just the Exynos SoCs, and just because YOU think it makes sense "from a business point of view" for them to only ship in-house SoCs does not make it so. Perhaps there are other more lucrative (like NAND or otherwise) demands on their fabs. There is a new iPhone coming soon too, not to mention all the other stuff Samsung manufactures silicon for. In addition, the Exynos Octa is a pretty serious departure from their previous Exynos/Hummingbird designs. Hence, this entire production run may be more of a "trial" than Samsung is letting on. There's a reason they're having issues getting the chip into its thermal envelope and it's at least partially because they haven't done something like this before. And there's the whole issue of the state of the kernel-mode drivers for power management and hot-swapping cores. It's a first-gen design, and the code written to accommodate it will also be pretty first-gen. Not too say that big.LITTLE doesn't have many merits, and indeed, it does seem like the wave of the future, it just isn't perfect yet.

Point is, I find it unlikely that the North American region will ever see an Exynos GS4. That said, its possible that Europe and other markets may eventually see a shift of Snapdragon to Exynos at some point, but given the estimates of how many phones Samsung is planning on selling, it certainly won't happen anytime in the next 3-4 months. And possibly ever. Plus, given that the performance from each SoC is probably within a 5-10% margin of the other, (whether comparing CPU/GPU/heat/power or otherwise), what incentive does Samsung have to try to make them all Exynos? Sure it keeps more business in-house, but again, if the Samsung Semiconductor has other more lucrative things to do, or simply can't keep up with demand, then it doesn't really help them make money. And after all is said and done, making money is what Samsung is most interested in.

---------- Post added at 12:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:25 PM ----------

Congratulations, you're the millionth person to mis-understand what's being said here. All they're saying is that the SoC can support all bands of LTE, even though that LTE support is dependent on a separate radio chip, and a myriad of other signalling/processing/amplifying chips, not to mention different antennas.

It's like saying "my laptop supports all variants of SATA-3 devices". Wow! Awesome! I can put any hard drive into my computer? That's so cool! Does it mean my laptop comes with all variants of hard drives known to man? No. Very much no. It's basically just saying that my interface can support all of the different devices that might connect to it.

Even if a SoC and modem together could technically support "20 bands" of LTE, a whole heck of a lot else has to happen to make that "support" actually turn into a phone that can connect to a given band. Further, there is currently no setup I've ever seen, or heard of, or is even rumored to exist that supports 20 different bands of LTE. Perhaps as technology continues to develop, there will be breakthroughs that allow for such things, but at the moment, I believe it's impossible in the "smartphone" form factor.

Of course, that doesn't stop people from jumping to wild conclusions that aren't anywhere based in fact. Hence the very poor journalistic reporting on the "20 band LTE support", and the massive quantity of people that now think that every single Exynos Octa chip magically connects to every LTE network on the planet. :(