A couple of days ago, Qualcomm unveiled its brand new flagship chipset—the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1—built on the 4nm process. At the time of the announcement, nothing was said about who manufactured the new SoC, but some Qualcomm executives have now shared that information.
It turns out that the famous chip maker will be sticking with Samsung Foundry for the making of its debuting high-end chipset, just like with the Snapdragon 888 (2020). On the other hand, the older Snapdragon 865 (2019) and Snapdragon 855 (2018) models were made by Taiwan’s TSMC, but it seems Qualcomm has decided to remain with Samsung for the time being.
The confirmation of this decision came from Qualcomm’s very own CEO Cristiano Amon, who revealed the manufacturer at a Q&A session at the company’s annual summit. As another piece of information to support this, Alex Katouzian, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Qualcomm’s Mobile, Compute, and infrastructure business, was questioned by reporters on the topic and replied that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is not made by TSMC (via SamMobile)
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1’s position in the chip food chain is high up there with the other big players such as the A15 Bionic from Apple, MediaTek’s recently released Dimensity 9000, and the upcoming Exynos 2200. All of these are built on the 4nm process, which makes them very powerful SoCs, but ones also equipped with great power efficiency. However, the chips made by TSMC are said to be the more efficient ones of the bunch.
Nevertheless, the joined forces of Qualcomm and Samsung make a lot of sense, especially since the Galaxy S22 series will most likely be equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in some markets or the Dimensity 2200 in others.
The first phone to rock the latest and greatest from Qualcomm, however, is now known to be the Xiaomi 12, and later on, probably followed by the Motorola Edge 30.