It has been speculated that tech giant Samsung will be realigning its marketing calendar and release the next flagship early next year. Recent reports indicate that this could indeed happen as the South Korean company has apparently already begun producing the new Exynos processor that will run the Samsung Galaxy S7.

According to South Korean publication ET News, as translated and reported by industry follower GSM Arena, Samsung has already begun mass-producing the Exynos 8890 chipset. This processor is the first one that Samsung will assemble on its own, without the need for any third-party components. The previous Exynos chipsets were architecturally assembled with certain components on its core made by outside parties like ARM.

In the new Exynos 8890 chipset, Samsung will be assembling the chipsets from the ground up, using the company's own plants to make custom ARMv8 cores. The new Exynos processor, also called the M1 or Mongoose chipset, is rumored to be running the upcoming Galaxy S7. However, as Phone Arena puts it, the Exynos 8890 chipset is but one of the variants in the S7 lineup. According to speculations, Samsung will also be launching an S7 version with a Snapdragon 820 processor as its core. Additional speculations suggest that Samsung will be having three variants of the S7 unit, with the third one bearing a lower-level Exynos chipset.

The three variants of the S7 will also have a regular display for the base model and Edge displays for the S7 Edge and S7 Edge Plus. These three are rumored to appear simultaneously and will have the same release dates.

If the mass production rumor is true, then Samsung might well be targeting a January announcement for the Galaxy S7, much earlier than the announcement periods for previous S-series flagships. This will also place the release dates of the S7 earlier than expected, either in February or March next year.