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A report from Re/code claims that Qualcomm will be using Samsung’s foundries to make its next high-end chipset — the Snapdragon 820.
The company has usually relied on TSMC to manufacture its chips, including its existing high-end 64-bit Snapdragon 810 chip.
Samsung currently has an advantage over other foundries as it is already churning out 14nm FinFET based chips, while TSMC is still stuck at the 20nm fabrication process, which tilted the decision in favor of the Korean company. A lower fabrication process leads to cost saving, but more importantly, leads to a decrease in power consumption and the heat being generated by the chip.
Qualcomm lost the contract to supply Snapdragon 810 chips to Samsung for the Galaxy S6 because of the overheating issues plaguing the chipset. This ultimately led Samsung to use its own 14nm based Exynos 7420 chipset on its latest Galaxy.
Qualcomm’s next high-end chip is going to be the Snapdragon 820, which is expected to make its way into high-end Android devices released in the first half of 2016. Unlike Snapdragon 810, the upcoming chip will make use of Qualcomm’s own custom 64-bit cores that should help alleviate the overheating issues associated with using ARM’s 64-bit Cortex-A57 chips in a big.LITTLE cluster.
[Via Re/code]
