This year has been a pretty rocky year for Qualcomm. With their octa-core and hexa-core chipsets (the Snapdragon 615, 808 and 810), have all had some sort of issue. Either overheating, or just being really slow to keep from overheating. Qualcomm also got hit badly when Samsung opted to use their own Exynos chipset in their flagships this year. Qualcomm is hoping that the Snapdragon 820 will be able to put them back on track next year. Many leakers have said that the Snapdragon 820 will still overheat, but it’s tough to tell at this stage of the game. There have been rumors that Samsung would be manufacturing the Snapdragon 820 chipset in their own facilities. And now a new report coming out of Weibo (a Chinese micro-blogging website) states that the South Korean tech giant will be manufacturing both 10nm and 14nm versions of the Snapdragon 820.
This source out of China is also claiming that Samsung is going to manufacture the Snapdragon 820 14nm using their own 14nm LPP node. While the 10nm variant will be done using the LPE node from Samsung. Now the reason that Samsung will not be doing production of the 10nm FinFET version of the Snapdragon 820 at first is due to when the processor will go into mass production. Which is currently slated for the end of 2015. Rumors are pointing to the fact that once Samsung begins manufacturing 10nm mobile chipsets, they will likely switch the Snapdragon 820 over to the FinFET version which is said to be more power efficient.
It’s important that all of this be taken as a rumor and not fact. As nothing here has been confirmed. Qualcomm has not started mass production of the Snapdragon 820 just yet. However it is slated to begin in either late 2015 or early 2016. We should expect it in the first few smartphones that will be announced in 2016, possibly starting at CES in January, if not then definitely at Mobile World Congress which generally takes place the last week or February or the first week of March. It’s a bit odd to have Samsung manufacturing Qualcomm’s chipset, but maybe this is a way for Qualcomm to get their biggest customer back on board and buying their chipsets.