Samsung will be fabbing the Snapdragon 865 chipset

Samsung 7nm EUV foundry scored several major contracts. A Korean news source reports that Qualcomm has picked Samsung to make the Snapdragon 865 chipset, instead of TSMC. The deal is not yet complete but is reportedly in the final stages.

TSMC was Qualcomm’s foundry of choice to fab the 7nm chipsets – Snapdragon 845 and 855 – taking over from Samsung, which built the 820 and 835.

Qualcomm believes that Samsung’s 7nm EUV process is more advanced than TSMC’s 7nm node. There’s info circulating on Twitter that there will be two versions of the Snapdragon 865 – standard and one with a X55 5G modem.

Samsung’s foundries will also be producing GPU chips for Nvidia, which has used TSMC for years. The new Ampere architecture will be the company’s first on a 7nm process, the current Turing cards (20xx and 16xx) are built by TSMC on a custom 12nm process.

IBM has also selected Samsung’s 7nm EUV foundries for the next generation Power processors. The next flagship Exynos chipset (the one bound for the Galaxy Note10) is also expected to be built on this EUV process.

Samsung has plans to expand its EUV foundries to handle the increased demand, the new production lines will be put in production in February next year.

PS. Samsung and AMD partnered up to develop mobile GPUs. Samsung already fabs some of the chips for some of its GPUs (e.g. RX 590), but AMD is sticking to TSMC for its new Zen 2-based CPUs and the new Navi-based cards (RX 5700). TSMC is already busy building the Apple A13 and Kirin 985 chipsets too.

Source (in Chinese) | Via