Samsung’s foundry business is on the rise over the last few quarters. The previous reports suggested that Qualcomm has chosen to use Samsung’s foundries for Snapdragon 875 production instead of TSMC. According to the latest report from South Korea, Samsung will manufacture the newly announced 8nm Snapdragon 750 5G mobile platform.
This new 5G chipset in the Snapdragon 7-series will use Samsung’s 8nm FinFET process. The Samsung Exynos 9820 is the first chip to come out of the company’s 8nm process node. Even the new-gen RTX 3000 Ampere GPUs are manufactured using Samsung’s 8nm process.
Qualcomm turns to Samsung for producing the 8nm Snapdragon 750 SoC
Xiaomi has already confirmed to launch the world’s first smartphone powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 750 mobile platform. As per the source, the Mi 10 Lite 5G will debut later this year with this new chipset. Even Samsung will also use the Snapdragon 750 SoC in its upcoming Galaxy A42 smartphone.
Both these smartphones will be hitting markets in the coming months. Earlier this week, the renders of the Galaxy A42 5G also appeared online. Based on the rumors, Samsung’s most affordable 5G smartphone will cost €369 (approx. $434) in Europe.
Compared to the 7nm process, Samsung’s 8nm process is said to be relatively cheaper in price and has decent processing technology. Samsung is also in charge of the manufacturing the Qualcomm’s most affordable 5G mobile processor. Qualcomm will be launching the all-new Snapdragon 4-series mobile platform in early 2021 with a built-in 5G modem.
Samsung is the world’s second-largest contract foundry
During the announcement, Qualcomm has officially confirmed this chipset to be manufactured by the South Korean giant. Samsung is the second-largest company in the global foundry business. In the third quarter of this year, it has a market share of 17.4 percent.
Still, it is far behind the 53.9 percent market share of TSMC. The recently inked deals with Qualcomm, IBM, Nvidia, and other major tech companies are expected to raise Samsung’s foundry market share to above 20 percent in 2021.
The company has already promised to invest KRW 133 trillion (approx. $112 billion) to become the world’s No. 1 chipmaker by 2030. Samsung’s foundry business is expected to have $3.67 billion in revenue in the third quarter of this year.
The earlier reports suggested that the Snapdragon 875 deal alone is worth between $850 million and $1 billion. This is also the first time for Samsung to make all the flagship chipsets for Qualcomm. The Snapdragon 875 will be made using Samsung’s most advanced 5nm EUV technology.