Qualcomm may seek help from TSMC to produce Snapdragon 8 mobile platform chips
At the previous Snapdragon Technology Summit, Qualcomm officially launched a new generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, which is Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. According to Qualcomm’s introduction, the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform uses Samsung’s 4nm process and uses a 1+3+4 triple cluster architecture, composed of one Cortex-X2@3.0 GHz, three Cortex-A710@2.5 GHz and four Cortex-A510@1.8 GHz, at the same time equipped with Snapdragon X65 5G baseband. Although Qualcomm’s flagship SoC next year continued its cooperation with Samsung, things did not seem to go as expected.
According to DigiTimes, Samsung’s 4nm process has a yield problem, which makes Qualcomm very disappointed. Qualcomm also has its own backup solution, and it is rumored that it will turn to TSMC to produce Snapdragon 8 mobile platform chips to achieve diversification of the supply chain and ensure the supply of chips. This idea of Qualcomm is easy to understand. In addition to higher yields, TSMC’s advanced technology also performs better in terms of performance and energy consumption. This year, Qualcomm caused a shortage of chip supply due to Samsung’s 5nm process capacity issues, which eventually led to Qualcomm’s quarterly financial reports that fell short of expectations.
In fact, this news is not the first time it has appeared. About half a year ago, there were reports that Qualcomm planned to reallocate orders for high-end Snapdragon chips to TSMC. As the largest foundry in the world, TSMC has already been overloaded and its production capacity is already very tight. However, this year TSMC also squeezed out part of its production capacity, using the 6nm process to produce the Snapdragon 778G mobile platform chips for Qualcomm. This SoC is positioned similarly to the Snapdragon 780G produced by Samsung using the 5nm process and is a mid-range product.
