Snapdragon 830 Processor From… Samsung?

The world’s waiting on the next fastest chip on mobile devices, and Samsung’s apparently the one making it for Qualcomm.

Any which way you look at them, Samsung is a huge, huge, huge company — with influence over the world’s lives, one way or another.

In fact it’s a bit of an iceberg — there’s 90% more to Samsung and it’s influence over the electronics world, than we’d ever know.

So far most of us know that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821 (powering even Google’s new Pixel phone) is the latest and greatest mobile chipset from Qualcomm. But seems like, this is going to change soon as reportedly the company (Qualcomm) is already readying it’s Next Big One, the Snapdragon 830 in collaboration with (read this slowly)… Samsung.

And we’re fairly certain about it.

The internet is already talking about in spots and in forums, but we’ve been digging around, and have found more than a spadeful of traces of this rumour’s legitimacy.

Qualcomm could have counted on Samsung for Snapdragon 830 for two reasons.

First things first, Samsung is already manufacturing the Snapdragon 820 for Qualcomm. They seem to have an effective working equation and naturally Qualcomm would also want to maintain the status quo in case of its next-generation mobile processor.

Secondly, Samsung is probably thinking of using the same old strategy that it employed in case of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge models — which is that the Galaxy S8 model released in the U.S. will get the latest Snapdragon 830 chipset while the version released in other countries would get Samsung’s own Exynos 8895 built into the new Galaxy S8 device.

According to ET News, this kind of a situation is a happy medium for both the companies, as, “When Samsung decided to use its own chipsets instead for the Galaxy S6, Qualcomm reported a 4.5% decrease in year-to-year earnings. Samsung decided to employ Qualcomm’s chipsets again this year with the Galaxy S7 because Qualcomm agreed that the 14nm chipsets will be manufactured by Samsung… The production of Snapdragon 830 chipsets will be under similar conditions”.

So, let’s add a third reason: Samsung probably has the best proven capability, hardware and scale to produce this chipset in the gargantuan quantities that will be needed by the devices world in the next 12–18 months.

There are very few other plants and manufacturers who have the creds and crews for something this mammoth.

If reports are to be believed then this latest Snapdragon 830 chip is being produced using the 10nm process.

To explain, this refers to the semiconductor fabrication that employs process technologies between 10 and 20 nanometers. This when compared to the Snapdragon 820 is quite advanced as it is rolling out of Samsung’s facilities through the second-generation 14nm LPP FinFET node.

There is a lack of information about how fast, better or efficient Snapdragon 830 is as compared to its predecessor. But, a reflection on the change in adopted frequencies for the manufacturing of chips might prove useful.

The move towards 10 nm definitely marks Samsung’s aim at higher frequencies. As per report from SamMobile, Samsung’s Exynos 8895, which is also said to be using the same 10nm process, has registered 4 GHz peak speed on the Mongoose core, so that its Cortex A53 core achieves 2.7 GHz.

To save you the effort of googling that technical mumbo jumbo, this simply means that at least 30% improvement in performance can be expected out of this process!

What’s even more interesting are the reports which allege that Qualcomm and Samsung have collaborated on a technology dubbed as Fan-out Panel Level Package (FoPLP) technology.

Again simply stated what this technology does is that it renders the printed circuit board for the package substrate obsolete.

Rings a bell?

This is somewhat similar to TSMC’s Integrated Fan Out technology found in Apple’s A10 chipset.

A lack of clarity regarding the same leads to difficulty in pin-pointing exact details about the processor chip. However, some bits of reports mention that this could possibly help in decreasing the production cost and would enable a better integration of the I/O ports which further implies a thinner package.

Apart from possibly packing in the latest Snapdragon 830 microchip from Qualcomm, the Samsung Galaxy S8 is expected to pack a lot more exciting features like a 4K Edge display, a dual camera set-up similar to those on the iPhone 7 Plus and Huawei P9, and Google’s Android Nougat operating system.

The phone might see the light of the day at Mobile World Congress 2017.

Now it’s important to remember that no official sources have so far confirmed these speculated features and news about the collaboration between Samsung and Qualcomm so it’s wise to not take these speculations as set in stone. At the time of release, things might appear differently.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.