Samsung and Huawei are the two smartphone OEMs which also manufacture their mobile SoCs, name Exynos and Kirin, respectively. Well, as some of you might know, LG has tried to join them in the past with their Nuclun SoC, but that didn’t exactly work. This Korea-based tech giant has stumbled upon a number of problems along the way, their chips had heating issues on top of everything, and LG has decided to get back to the drawing board and figure it out.
That being said, it seems like the company is working hard in order to start manufacturing their chips in the near future. According to a report, the company is working on a Nuclun 2 SoC which should avoid all the problems the first-gen processor had. According to last week’s report, LG has collaborated with both Intel and TSMC, and has created two separate Nuclun 2 chips. The ones made in collaboration with Intel allegedly offered better performance, but it seems like that Intel won’t be manufacturing the Nuclun 2 SoC after all, at least not according to this report.
The Nuclun 2 SoC manufactured by Intel is based on Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72 cores which are working together in heterogeneous computing big.LITTLE architecture. The SoC was also supposed to include Intel’s XMM 7360 modem with support for category 10 4G LTE connectivity speeds. The SoC manufactured by TSMC, on the other hand, is based on a 16nm manufacturing process, and the CPU is running at 2.1GHz. Intel’s SoC is using a 14nm FinFET tech, and is running at 2.4GHz, so… as you can see, Intel’s SoC is more powerful on paper.
Now, you’re probably wondering why wouldn’t LG collaborate with Intel? Well, according to a report, it’s due to a low production capacity. This might be the (main) reason LG will opt for TSMC, whose chip is also plenty powerful, of course. Now, we still don’t know when will this SoC be released, but we’re guessing it might happen in the first quarter of next year. So, will LG use their Nuclun SoC in the upcoming LG G5 handset? Well, it’s possible, though I doubt LG will step away from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs so easily, so it’s possible we’ll see two variants of that smartphone.