Samsung has announced on Jan. 14 it has joined forces with Qualcomm to mass produce Snapdragon 820 processor.
The South Korean company says on a press release that the chipset will use its new 14nm LPP process and it will be included on smartphones that are slated to be launched during the first half of the year.
"We are pleased to start production of our industry-leading, 2nd generation 14nm FinFET process technology that delivers the highest level of performance and power efficiency," said Charlie Bae, Samsung's Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, System LSI Business.
Bae added that is going to continue offering "derivative processes of its advanced 14nm FinFET technology" in an aim to maintain the company's technology leadership.
Exactly the reason as to why Qualcomm teamed up with Samsung is not known at the moment. Samsung also did not divulge the benefit this partnership with Qualcomm could bring.
In the meantime, Qualcomm said on Jan. 14 Samsung is going to be the sole manufacturer of its new flagship mobile chip.
"This is very significant because never before has Qualcomm used foundries other than TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.] to make high-end chipsets," said Warren Lau, an analyst at Maybank Kim Eng.
Lau approximated that Samsung could gain more than $1 billion in revenue from the Snapdragon 820 orders.
Qualcomm had reportedly faced a few problems last year. For instance, the first generation of its Snapdragon 810 allegedly had heating issues.
Speculations were rife that these issues triggered Samsung to move away from Qualcomm's chipset and use instead its own Exynos chip for its high-end Galaxy lineup last year. LG also used Snapdragon 808 for its flagship smartphones. With the new version of Snapdragon 810, however, it is believed that overheating issues have already been addressed.
Snapdragon 820
The Snapdragon 820 is a 2.2 GHz quad-core 64-bit chipset. It is said to support up to 28-megapixel shooters with 4K video capture plus playback. Additionally, the chipset is expected to support X12 LTE, QuickCharge 3.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
The chip is also believed to go under the hoods of a few upcoming smartphones, including Samsung's Galaxy S7 variants, Xiaomi Mi 5, LeTV's Le Max Pro and LG G5.
