There are too many melons that can be eaten in the recent chip market. Intel, TSMC and other chip manufacturers have news almost every day. Today, there is new news between TSMC and Qualcomm.
According to media reports, qualcomm's new 5G flagship chip "Snapdragon 8Gen1Plus" OEM orders are no longer carried out by Samsung, but instead produced by TSMC. TSMC will use the 4nm process for production, shipping as soon as April, and will be released in the third quarter. At present, neither TSMC nor Qualcomm has responded to this.
This is not the first time that Qualcomm has transferred the order of chip foundry to TSMC. In 2018, Samsung announced that the 7nm process began mass production, but TSMC's 7nm process has been mass-produced and has entered its third quarter. At that time, Qualcomm chose a new generation of flagship mobile phone chips to use TSMC's 7nm process projection.
In May last year, Qualcomm transferred to A single TSMC, and in the TSMC foundry, it was able to increase the production capacity of about 20,000 pieces with a 6nm process, plus more than 20,000 pieces originally produced, which is equivalent to doubling the output.
And now, Qualcomm has once again transferred to a single TSMC. The Qualcomm transfer order, mainly because of the problem of Samsung's 4nm process yield, the mass production is not smooth, hurting the shipment of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1Plus. In addition, the Snapdragon 8 and Exynos 2200 chips produced by Samsung have the problem of high temperature and high energy consumption. Relevant experiments have proved that the Motorola Edge X30 equipped with Samsung OEM Snapdragon 8 Gen 1Plus has serious heat problems, up to 58 degrees Celsius.
Various factors seem to make Qualcomm determined to choose to transfer the OEM order to TSMC's 4nm process. Analysts pointed out that with TSMC's foundry, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8Gen1Plus can not only complete the delivery in time, but also avoid overheating and frequency reduction of chips and improve efficiency because of TSMC's better process technology.
However, in December last year, in order to reduce its dependence on TSMC, Qualcomm transferred some chip orders from TSMC to Samsung. Now, Qualcomm has transferred orders from Samsung to TSMC, which seems to mean that Qualcomm's plan to reduce its dependence on TSMC has "failed".
Text | Zhao Jinjie title | Huang Zi gallium trial | Lu Shuoyi