Since the very first rumors about the recently-announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 flagship SoC we knew it would be produced by Samsung. Qualcomm established a partnership with the South-Korean firm to use its 4 nm foundries for the new flagship platform. However, the US-based chipmaker does not seem to be very satisfied with the results. This is not a surprise when we look at the current industry of chips. According to a new report, Qualcomm is now moving part of its production to TSMC in order to ensure enough chips for the growing demand.
As per the industry’s inside sources, Qualcomm is not happy with Samsung’s yields and isn’t capable of producing all the needed chipsets. As a result, TSMC will likely take over part of the production. However, some believe that this would have a negative effect on uniformity. Well, it’s hard to prevent differences between the platform even when both manufacturers are following the “same recipe”. This happened back in the days of the iPhone 6s when TSMC and Samsung were bot suppliers to the Apple A9 processors. Anyway, we can set the things into stone just yet. Perhaps, the technologies have evolved enough to reduce the differences between the two manufacturers.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 by Samsung and TSMC
This may be a major shift in Qualcomm’s strategy for its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips, but it’s not a big surprise. As we told before, the components industry has been suffering since the end of 2020 with many constraints. Chipmakers aren’t being able to deliver and this is affecting from pure hardware devices like consoles, graphics cards to system-on-chips found inside of the smartphones.
Curiously, Qualcomm will be using the two largest chipmakers behind the 2022 generation of chips. Samsung is producing its own Exynos 2200 chips with AMD GPUs and will be also behind a portion of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Meanwhile, TSMC will be making the next-gen Apple’s chips as well as MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 and Dimensity 7000 SoCs.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is based on the 4 nm process offering more performance and efficiency. It’s based on the newer ARMv9 architecture with one ARM Cortex-X2 core at 3.0 GHz, three ARM Cortex-A710 cores clocked at up to 2.5 GHz, and four ARM Cortex-A510 cores at up to 1.8 GHz. The device also has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 which promises to offer a new level of graphics for mobile games.
