Qualcomm is in quite a soup due to overheating and speed throttling issues in its current flagship SoC offering, the Snapdragon 810, and the company is trying to solve it by introducing a complete lineup of new processors, including the Snapdragon 820 and the Snapdragon 620, with custom CPU cores instead of stock ARM ones.
According to a new report, Qualcomm has jumped the TSMC ship to partner with Samsung for manufacturing their upcoming flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 820, reiterating a previous rumor. The report also states that these 64-bit Kyro CPU cores used in the Snapdragon 820 will be clocked at 3.0GHz, and will be manufactured using Samsung’s 14 nm FinFET process. Apparently, HTC, Sony, and Xiaomi will be the first ones to test the Snapdragon 820 chipset. Xiaomi is even interested to use the Snapdragon 820 in its upcoming flagship smartphone, the Mi 5, that is expected to be launched this October.
Since this new chipset will use Samsung’s 14 nm node process, it is expected to be more power efficient than the Snapdragon 810. It will be interesting to see whether Qualcomm’s new chipset will be able to run faster and cooler than the Exynos 7420 chipset that is used in the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 edge.