Samsung to Produce Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoCs

Samsung’s chip business made $10 billion (£7 billion) past year, according to analysts, and Apple accounted for over a sixth of that.

It should be noted that the South Korean major added Nvidia Corp as a client last year while Electronic times ( South Korea ) reported that Samsung would make Advanced Micro Devices this year and that it would use the Snapdragon 820 chips in some of its upcoming flagship Galaxy S7 handsets in 2017.

The technology used for the chips is similar to the one utilised by Samsung’s own Exynos processors.

Samsung’s new 14-nm LPP process delivers up to 15 percent higher speeds and consumes 15 percent less power than the previous 14-nm LPE process through improvements in transistor structure and process optimization, according to the firm. It doesn’t take long to figure out that the large customer was Samsung and now with Snapdragon 820 production deal, Qualcomm wants to mend severed ties.

Samsung is likely to pocket at least $1 billion for this partnership, and continues to develop its 14nm Exynos chips, but Snapdragons are already appearing in Galaxy devices.

Samsung are expected top use both of their new processors in this years flagship Galaxy S7, S7 Edge and S7 Edge+ handsets which will launch soon.

“This is very significant because never before has Qualcomm used foundries other than TSMC to make high-end chipsets”, Maybank Kim Eng analyst Warren Lau said.

“We are pleased to start production of our industry-leading, second generation 14-nm FinFET process technology that delivers the highest level of performance and power efficiency” said Charlie Bae, an executive vice president of Samsung’s system LSI business.