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Rumor ran amok earlier last year that Samsung and Qualcomm had gotten back together, and the relationship has even improved so much that Samsung was going to be manufacturing the Snapdragon 820 for them. Fast forward to today and, well, it’s true.
Samsung announced the news in a press release detailing that they’ve started mass producing their 2nd-Gen 14nm FinFet power process. We expected the silicon to be used in the Exynos 8 Octa, but Samsung is also lending their advancements to Qualcomm for the Snapdragon 820.
The 14nm FinFet process makes use of a 3D structure for its transistors. It allows Samsung to push more power with less circuitry, which in turn makes for lower power consumption. The gains and savings in those respective areas are both around 15%.
Qualcomm obviously has good reason to turn to Samsung on this for the technical benefits, but we bet they’re happier about the fact that they have one of their biggest customers back. Samsung strangely opted to skip out on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 for their 2015 smartphones and stuck to using their own Exynos lineup for all variants of the smartphone. Some will obviously speculate that decision was made due to the early overheating issues of the Snapdragon 810.
But that’s not to say Samsung isn’t getting anything out of this, as well. They’ll likely look to use Snapdragon 820 for their 2016 smartphones which should help them meet a potential high volume of demand for the Samsung Galaxy S7 lineup.
[via Samsung]
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