The IFA has come and gone, but users go on with the long wait for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3, and it has been almost a year and a half since its predecessor was released.

According to Andrew Martonik of Android Central, it is possible that Samsung is still happy about the current model or that the company believes "sales of tablets can't be high enough to justify a new model."

Interestingly, back in April, Samsung also updated the Galaxy Tab S2 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor. It is unknown if this is the entirety of the tech giant's efforts to replenish the tablet line for this year.

Android Authority points out that the hardware change is not much of a giant leap, as the original came with an octa-core Exynos 5433 processor with a 20nm manufacturing process.

The Snapdragon 652, while it comes with four newer and improved Cortex-A72 CPU cores, is built with a much larger 28nm manufacturing process. It is unclear if this new version will lead to Samsung Galaxy Tab S3's absence this year.

Samsung performed this update discreetly, and it has not been made clear as to why they did the tweaking that they did. Android Authority says that the price of the processors or improvement on the multi-core performance may have contributed to the change.

It is also possible that Samsung just wanted to get a slice of the faster modem capabilities that the Snapdragon 652 has to offer for the Tab S2. There's no word yet if the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 will not see the light of day due to this hardware update.

Updating current iterations with newer hardware is not new to tech companies. However, they do not necessarily reveal much on a full-blown successor.

Just recently, a Samsung tablet with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor paid a visit to Geekbench. It is not the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 though. Phone Arena says it is a new iteration of the Samsung Galaxy Tab E.

As for the release date of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3, the device is still believed to be launching this year.