Samsung has finally, officially confirmed that the company will be manufacturing the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chips, which are bound to be in many of 2016’s new flagship handsets.
Samsung is mostly known as a phone manufacturer but an important aspect of the company’s business is actually related to its foundries and chip manufacturing plants. With important clients like Apple, not to mention its own mobile device division, Samsung is a CPU manufacturing powerhouse. And the South Korean company seems to have scored another big win.
According to a press release, Samsung will be manufacturing Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 820 chip, the company’s most powerful SoC yet. This means that Samsung will essentially be making its competitor’s processors, though the Snapdragon 820 might also show up in some Galaxy phones.
Until now Snapdragon chips were manufactured by TSMC, but rumors started swirling last year, when the Snapdragon 810 turned out to have overheating issues. It’s not clear if this was in any way due to TSMC’s 20nm manufacturing process, but a move to Samsung’s more advanced, second generation 14nm FinFET process may prove to be very beneficial for the new 820 chips. There’s even a rumor going around that the Snapdragon 820 might be exclusive to Samsung phones for the first few months of 2016, but that’s unsubstantiated for now.
In either case, it’ll be very interesting to see how the Snapdragon 820 performs in the real world in the year ahead and whether Samsung’s advanced manufacturing techniques end up helping one of its main competitors.