Man walks past Qualcomm stand while attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona March 3, 2015. Ninety thousand executives, marketers and reporters gather in Barcelona this week for the telecom op (Photo : REUTERS/Albert Gea )
Qualcomm is believed to have approached Samsung to utilize the latter's chip manufacturing facility to manufacture its own Snapdragon 820 chips. The reason could be down to just a few nanometers - Samsung uses a 14nm manufacturing process compared to the 20nm facility Qualcomm relies on.
From a technical point of view, the thinner the wiring used, smaller will be the chips. Other inherent advantages of using thinner wires include less manufacturing cost and lower battery demands,stated Re-Code.
The current Samsung flagship, the S6 and S6 Edge make use of Samsung's own Exynos 7420 chips and has already proved its mettle in various benchmark tests. The Snapdragon 810 chip found application in the HTC One M9 and the LG GFlex 2. Though not exactly a couch but the Exynos 7420 thoroughly outperforms the Snapdragon 810, as has been proved in many a benchmark test.
Qualcomm's traditional manufacturing partner is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Samsung has broken convention by opting for its own chip for the S6 and S6 Edge instead of Snapdragon chips that used to power Samsung flagships in the past. With the move to manufacture its next gen chips at the Samsung facility, Qualcomm hopes to be back in the reckoning with Samsung for its future flagships.
Experts though doubt if that stands a chance considering the superb performance credential the Exynos 7420 has come to be known for.
Qualcomm, on the other hand, is pinning high hopes on its Snapdragon 820 chip which it hopes to be ready for a market debut towards end 2015 or early 2016. Qualcomm though is holding back on the full details except that it's going to be powered by its own ARMv8-A CPU core, christened Kryo. The current Snapdragon 810 makes do with ARM's reference Cortex-A57 and A53 cores.
Qualcomm also revealed its new Snapdragon 820 chip will be compatible with Zeroth advanced learning feature. Zeroth aims to mimic human behaviour such as identifying people from images and so on and aims to achieve that using the additional computational power the new Snapdragon 820 has to offer, stated Android Authority.
