Qualcomm has just teased the date for its next launch event, and rumors indicate that the company will unveil the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 on March 17, 2023. It is the successor to last year's Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 processor and is expected to bring faster performance and efficiency. But it's terrible news for Samsung's contract chip manufacturing business.
It is reported that the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 will be manufactured using TSMC's 4nm process instead of Samsung Foundry's 4nm LPE process used to make the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. TSMC's 4nm process has proven to be more efficient than Samsung Foundry's 4nm process, which means the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 will be more power efficient than its predecessor. It looks like Qualcomm is slowly moving away from Samsung Foundry to TSMC, as the former faced efficiency and yield issues for the past couple of years.
Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 reportedly uses TSMC's 4nm process
The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 reportedly features one Cortex-X2 CPU core clocked at 2.92GHz, three Cortex-A710 CPU cores clocked at 2.5GHz, and four Cortex-A510 CPU cores running at a maximum frequency of 1.8GHz. For graphics processing, the chipset reportedly features the Adreno 725 GPU clocked at 580MHz. This points to the chip being an underclocked version of the popular Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor. Moreover, this is the first time a Cortex-X series CPU is used in a Snapdragon 7 series chip.
Leaked benchmarks reveal the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 scoring 1,232 points in Geekbench's single-core CPU test and 4,095 points in the multi-core CPU test. That's almost as good as the MediaTek Dimensity 9000, which was close to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. So, even premium mid-range phones can be as fast as last year's flagship phones.
Although Samsung has had issues with its 4nm and 5nm nodes, its 3nm GAA is reportedly much better. Some rumors even claim it's better than TSMC's 3nm process, but only time will tell how good it is. Some rumors also claim that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will use Samsung Foundry's 3nm GAA, but you should take this claim with a handful of salt.
