Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 uses Samsung Foundry’s 4nm process, confirms Qualcomm CEO

Qualcomm flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Mobile SoC was launched earlier this week. Before it was officially launched, everyone knew that it would be made using a 4nm manufacturing process. Now we are learning through Qualcomm, this chip is made by Samsung Foundry.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon confirmed this at a Q&A session on Wednesday. Separately, Alex Katozien, Chipmaker’s senior VP and general manager of mobile, computing, and infrastructure business, told reporters in South Korea that the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 would not come from TSMC.

The development was first reported by the Korean report, The Elec (via). This means that the Samsung Exynos 2200 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips will use Samsung Foundry’s 4nm process. In comparison, TSMC’s 4nm manufacturing process is reported to be more efficient.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 along with Xiaomi 12 Series may launch later this month

Meanwhile, the Apple A15 Bionic and MediaTek Dimension 9000 use TSMC’s 4nm process. In particular, TSMC is the largest contract chipmaker in the world. The Taiwanese company is also one of the biggest rivals of the Samsung Foundry.

Although Qualcomm did not specify why Samsung went with the foundry for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, TSMC’s deal with Apple may have contributed to this.

If you do not know, most of TSMC’s semiconductor production capacity goes to Apple chips such as the A15 Bionic, M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max. The rest of its capacity goes to the 4nm MediaTek Dimension 9000 product. This leaves less space for other manufacturers such as Qualcomm, thus justifying the chipmaker’s decision to go with Samsung Foundry for its latest flagship SoC.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 could launch in the next few weeks. We also have confirmation that the Xiaomi 12 Series will be the first to be launched with the new Qualcomm Silicon‌. The chip will also reach the Samsung Galaxy S22 series in a few months from now.

The native Exynos 2200 SoC will be used in some variants of Samsung’s upcoming flagship lineup. Interestingly, both chipsets use Arm’s Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 cores. The Exynos 2200 also uses AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture to support features such as ray tracing.