Qualcomm is looking away from Samsung to produce its own Snapdragon 865 lineup and that could hurt Samsung's prospects. This is according to recent reports from Samsung's home region, which indicates that Qualcomm is opting for a Taiwanese TSMC instead.
The move would be despite the fact that Samsung foundry process roadmap, and its plans to build chips, months ago. Meanwhile, Samsung will build less expensive and less technically challenging chipsets such as Snapdragon 765 and Snapdragon 765G.
The reason for Qualcomm's decision is competition
Qualcomm's decision, the report claims, is directly related to Samsung being a competitor to the leading chip maker. Qualcomm leads the market by a wide margin when it comes to chipsets. But it does not build its own chips. Instead, the parcels work with companies that have foundries such as Samsung and TSMC.
Samsung has grown rapidly in the meantime. Its plans and growth in the number of factories and foundries indicate that it hopes to start gaining significant market share in the chipset market with Exynos chips.
Moreover, the company has started to enter direct competition with Qualcomm for 5G.
In September, Samsung announced the Exynos 980 portable processor. This is the first SoC with an integrated 5G modem, something Qualcomm avoided doing. Instead, Qualcomm is building chips that can integrate but integrate directly with 5G.
Samsung's AI powered SoC is manufactured with FinFET 8nm technology. It comes with an octa-core processor with two Cortex-A77 2.2GHz cores and six Cortex-A55 1.80GHz cores.
In addition to these specifications, the Samsung Exynos 980 can support the camera system that features a resolution of up to 108 megapixels. This is with synchronization of up to five individual sensors and three of them can be triggered simultaneously.
For encoding and decoding, 4K UHD Multi-Format (MFC) codec supports 120 fps video and HDR10 +.
All this puts the Exynos 980 on a solid foundation of performance compared to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865. This gives Qualcomm more reasons for the pause and more reason to choose a Samsung competitor over one of its direct production competitors.
What does Qualcomm's decision mean for Qualcomm?
Qualcomm's goal is to prevent Samsung from accessing its intellectual property. They are the technical documents, graphics, and other intellectual property needed to build a chip. You will need to provide Samsung with this information a year or more in advance.
If Qualcomm chooses Samsung, it opens its doors for Samsung to see those designs. The Snapdragon 865 is Qualcomm's most advanced chipset to date. Qualcomm chooses to keep this information away from Samsung.
In contrast, Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 and 765G are not designed to be quite as advanced as the Snapdragon 865. This is because they are not entrepreneurs. That leaves little room to borrow from Samsung or take inspiration from Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chips. The choice of TSMC leaves no room for the South Korean tech giant to see where Qualcomm might go or how far away it might be. So it is likely that Qualcomm will feel safe to allow Samsung to handle this production.
If reports from South Korea are accurate, the trend may continue as the battle for its share of the global segment market intensifies.
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