From the depths of rumourland comes the speculation that Samsung's next-gen Note device might come with unreleased Qualcomm hardware. 

There's been plenty of chatter about the Samsung Galaxy Note 20, with suggestion that it's going to essentially be the Galaxy S20+ but with the inclusion of the S Pen.

Recently-discovered benchmarks, however, suggest that this future device might be packing in an upgraded version of Qualcomm's 2020 hardware. With these sorts of things you always have to take them with a pinch of salt - and there's a lot of speculation going on here.

In 2019, Qualcomm did have different versions of its core hardware, with the Snapdragon 855 and 855+, the latter a minor tweak on the platform for slightly better performance. It was introduced in the middle of the year, a sort of progression of the platform. 

There's the assumption that this is going to happen again, derived from the configuration reported by the Geekbench results appended to this device, reported by a regular Twitter leaker with a fairly good reputation in these matters.

It this is the case, then it looks like the new Note might offer a little more than just the S Pen as a point of differentiation to the Galaxy S20 family.  Of course the big question will be what happens to the dual-strand nature of Samsung's devices. 

There's been something of a popular uprising around Samsung's use of Exynos - its own hardware - in many versions of its phones. The general feeling is that the Snapdragon version is better than the Exynos, but we suspect that Samsung will still have an Exynos version of the Note 20 too.

Currently there's no timeline on when we might see the Note 20 launch, we'd normally expect it to be around August, but the impact of the global coronavirus pandemic might shift that date.