The Samsung Foundry produced the 4nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset and the foundry was expected to build the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset. But Samsung had a problem at the time and its yield was only 35%. This means that only 35% of the chips manufactured by Samsung Foundry from each silicon wafer passed quality control. TSMC’s yield for its 4nm process node was 70% at the time.
So it wasn’t just Qualcomm that switched Samsung and TSMC sourced the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, it remained the world’s largest foundry over the current top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 application processor (AP). And TSMC is rumored to be a foundry which builds the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset.
Although Qualcomm is headquartered in San Diego, it posted the release date of its next new product on Chinese social media site Weibo. That date is March 17, 2023, known as St. Patrick’s Day. Per SamMobile, at least one of the new chips introduced is the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1, which is a follow-up to last year’s premium mid-range Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 SoC.
Qualcomm will hold its next new product event on March 17
The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 was built by Samsung Foundry using a 4nm process node, while the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 comes off TSMC’s assembly line and uses its 4nm node. Over the years, Qualcomm has alternated between TSMC and Samsung Foundry, and the pendulum has shifted to TSMC because the latter’s chips have been more energy efficient. And of course TSMC has had higher returns.
The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 is rumored to feature a high-performance Cortex-X2 CPU core clocked at 2.92GHz, three Cortex-A710 CPUs clocked at 2.5GHz, and four Cortex-A510 high-performance CPUs with kernels that run on a clock. speed 1.8 GHz. The chip’s leaked benchmark test on Geekbench yielded a single-core score of 1,232 and a multi-core score of 4,095, which means premium mid-range smartphones will soon be quite fast.