Samsung to become the Sole Provider of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 SoCs

[soldier_ph]

Summary

Fresh rumors out of South Korea has it that Samsung has snagged an opportunity to become the Sole Manufacturer and Provider of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 SoC. The reason for this according to an Industry Insider is simple: Money. Samsung has simply offered lower pricing for SoCs manufactured under its 5 nm EUV process than TSMC did. The deal is claimed to be worth a cool $840 Mil.

 

Quotes

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-Quote from TechPowerUp-

Rumors fresh of South Korean shores claim that Samsung has snagged a position as sole provider for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 875 SoC on its 5 nm EUV manufacturing process. The reason for this, according to a supposed industry insider, boiled down to money (as it almost always does): Samsung simply offered lower pricing for chips manufactured under its 5 nm EUV process than TSMC did. The deal has been claimed to be worth some $840M. This makes sense, as Samsung has a considerable product portfolio - including lucrative memory fabrication - from which it can pool resources so as to lower pricing for new manufacturing technologies, whereas TSMC can only count on revenues it brings in from contracted silicon manufacturing deals.

With Samsung already manufacturing NVIDIA's Ampere on its 8 nm node, and now with a confirmed high-volume client with Qualcomm, this likely means more available capacity for other TSMC clients - of which we could mention AMD and Apple.

 

My thoughts

So now that Samsung produces the Snapdragon 875 and the Ampere GPUs it'll mean that TSMC will have more fab space available for folks like AMD and Apple, so I hope for AMD that they won't experience such delays again like it happened to them with Renoir and TSMC not being able to produce enough Chips due to High Demand. And with Nvidia now acquiring ARM for $40 Billion it'll reshape the Industry of SoCs and chips based on ARM big TIme.

 

Sources

TechPowerUP

[xtroria]

If this means us non americans dont have to deal with the BS of processor disparity, that would be great

[williamcll]

Would this mean that Apple and AMD can lower their price now that Nvidia and Huawei has pulled their orders out of TSMC?

[LAwLz]

5 hours ago, xtroria said:

If this means us non americans dont have to deal with the BS of processor disparity, that would be great

If you're talking about Exynos vs Qualcomm then no this deal won't matter.

[ne0tic]

I wonder how good Samsung 5nm really is compared to TSMC 5nm? If we go from Samsungs past, they have been quite a bit behind TSMC in terms of yield and density node to node. 

[Vector0102]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

If you're talking about Exynos vs Qualcomm then no this deal won't matter.

Well, if they're (Exynos and Qualcomm variants) gonna be made on the same node, the performance gap should be bridged by atleast a small amount.

[paddy-stone]

13 hours ago, soldier_ph said:

$840 Mio.

Typo?  meant to say Mil?

[Fatih19]

6 hours ago, williamcll said:

Would this mean that Apple and AMD can lower their price now that Nvidia and Huawei has pulled their orders out of TSMC?

Would this mean AMD can keep its product in stock now that Nvidia and Huawei has pulled their orders out of TSMC?

[RejZoR]

And yet European users will still get the inferior Exynos in Samsung devices where everyone else will be enjoying brand new Snapdragon 875 made by... Samsung... It's such a weird situation that makes me not wan to buy any Samsung phone until they address this nonsense. Either price them accordingly or just stop doing this. Or just make Exynos actually comparable to Snapdragon offerings. Samsung used to have the performance crown with Exynos, I wonder what's going on there...

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, Vector0102 said:

Well, if they're (Exynos and Qualcomm variants) gonna be made on the same node, the performance gap should be bridged by atleast a small amount.

That's true. But the performance gap should be bridged anyway since Samsung will be switching over to using "stock" ARM cores next gen anyway.

 

43 minutes ago, Fatih19 said:

Would this mean AMD can keep its product in stock now that Nvidia and Huawei has pulled their orders out of TSMC?

Probably not.

Switching around capacity like that is, from what I have heard, a process that takes quite a bit of time. Ramping up and down production is no easy task and companies in general would rather have a shortage than a stockpile of unsold products. Especially since ramping up or down is such a slow process that they can't just do it reactively to sales. If they say "we need more production capacity" then they will be stuck with that capacity even if demand goes down.

 

 

  

2 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

And yet European users will still get the inferior Exynos in Samsung devices where everyone else will be enjoying brand new Snapdragon 875 made by... Samsung... It's such a weird situation that makes me not wan to buy any Samsung phone until they address this nonsense. Either price them accordingly or just stop doing this. Or just make Exynos actually comparable to Snapdragon offerings. Samsung used to have the performance crown with Exynos, I wonder what's going on there...

They tried doing their own CPU designs and it just didn't work out as planned. They have already shut down their own CPU design division and will be back to stock ARM cores with the Galaxy S21.

They are also working with AMD for GPU designs which will probably show up in the Galaxy S22.

 

 

Samsung made a bad move ~4 years ago, they tried sticking to it in hopes that things got better, and have now realized that they are just getting more and more behind, so they will fix it. It's just that fixing stuff takes time.

 

Also worth noting that the Exynos chips aren't strictly worse. For example both the S10 and S20 Exynos versions have had better image processing than the Snapdragon models. 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15845/mobile-phone-camera-overview-2020-h1/6

Quote

There’s still too big a divergence in processing between the S20 Ultra and S20+ and the Snapdragon and Exynos variants. It feels to me that even to this date the Exynos just has the much better processing, both in daylight and low-light.

 

[RejZoR]

@LAwLz

You think using "stock" ARM core design will keep them closer to Snapdragon? Qualcomm is probably using some special sauce on top to make them so fast...

[LAwLz]

19 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

@LAwLz

You think using "stock" ARM core design will keep them closer to Snapdragon? Qualcomm is probably using some special sauce on top to make them so fast...

Nope, no special sauce, at least not on the CPU side.

Qualcomm's strengths aren't in their CPU cores. Their cores aren't anything special. Their strength is in having a complete package (good CPU, GPU, memory interface, DSP, etc), and their modems. CPU wise they are actually pretty bad, at least compared to for example Apple (and the X1 that will come out next year).

 

I wouldn't be surprised to see single core performance on the next Exynos chip be ~30% to 35% higher than the Snapdragon 865.

 

 

GPU on the other hand will probably be a challenge for Samsung. Their work with AMD will not be ready for the S21, so they will have to go with whatever ARM has for them (Mali-G78?), which has typically not been as good as Adreno.

 

 

Edit: Dammit I should have said I had "inside sources" because whenever someone on the Internet says that everything they say automatically becomes true, reliable, and believable.

[Arika]

43 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

@LAwLz

You think using "stock" ARM core design will keep them closer to Snapdragon? Qualcomm is probably using some special sauce on top to make them so fast...

 

As @LAwLz said, they are pretty standard Cortex cores. think of it in terms of a GPU. Nvidia make the RTX 3080 Chip and reference card (ARM Cortex) this is then sold to AIB partners who can create their own custom board and make relevant modifications/tweaks (Qualcomm Kyro) to fit their business model, but at its heart, it's still a RTX 3080 chip (cortex)

 

The reason that qualcomm do better than the exynos chips is that most android apps are designed with Cortex framework in mind with all the optimization that comes with it. Samsung did their own thing by merging some of their own cores (Exynos M#) with standard Cortex cores. Giving you a weird 2+2+4 config in their most recent SoCs, instead of a more standard 4+4 big.LITTLE. Prior to 2018 they did do 4+4, but it was 4 Exynos performance cores with 4 low power cortex cores, so there was no actual "standard" high performance cores.

[S w a t s o n]

Hmmm...

 

https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/08/05/samsung-lost-qualcomm-5nm-orders-tsmc/

 

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We had recently reported that the Samsung Foundry is struggling with low yields of its 5nm EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) process. Now, it is being reported that Qualcomm could shift the original order of Snapdragon X60 modem and Snapdragon 875 SoC to TSMC.

 

It seems that instead of shifting all the orders back from Samsung to TSMC, Qualcomm will distribute the orders among these two companies. Samsung also has an order of Snapdragon 735 SoC on 5nm node and is reportedly working on Exynos 1000 SoC.

 

[RejZoR]

14 minutes ago, Benjamin22044 said:

I guess people know that even Exynos is designed and manufactured by Samsung and it is not doing any good in the market. Perhaps, Qualcomm is looking to tank its popularity a bit and this could be an opportunity for MediaTek. 

Mediatek's Dimensity chipsets are pretty awesome and are becoming super popular, especially since Qualcomm raised the prices of Snapdragon. Mediatek G series (G80 and G90) are also quite popular in low and mid end phones. I hope they do well and make Dimensity even better and more competing with Snapdragon. Coz that's great for us in general.

[Arika]

4 minutes ago, Benjamin22044 said:

I guess people know that even Exynos is designed and manufactured by Samsung and it is not doing any good in the market. Perhaps, Qualcomm is looking to tank its popularity a bit and this could be an opportunity for MediaTek. 

What? . A snapdragon 875 is still a snapdragon 875 regardless of who manufactures it. 

 

Samsung's Exynos aren't as good as snapdragon because they are a completely different product, not because they are made by Samsung. You can refer to my previous comment. 

 

If there are people that believe what you mentioned above, I would advise you to ignore them, because they are either misinformed or just dislike Samsung and are looking to throw shade. 

[soldier_ph]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

And yet European users will still get the inferior Exynos in Samsung devices where everyone else will be enjoying brand new Snapdragon 875 made by... Samsung... It's such a weird situation that makes me not wan to buy any Samsung phone until they address this nonsense. Either price them accordingly or just stop doing this. Or just make Exynos actually comparable to Snapdragon offerings. Samsung used to have the performance crown with Exynos, I wonder what's going on there...

Yeah. Or just stop putting the Exynos Chips into the High End phones all together.

[LAwLz]

35 minutes ago, soldier_ph said:

Yeah. Or just stop putting the Exynos Chips into the High End phones all together.

Bad idea on all fronts.

The best outcome is if Samsung drops Qualcomm completely. 

Samsung's Exynos processors should be caught up with Qualcomm in a year or two, and we really need to break Qualcomm's monopoly on high end SoCs.

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, ne0tic said:

I wonder how good Samsung 5nm really is compared to TSMC 5nm? If we go from Samsungs past, they have been quite a bit behind TSMC in terms of yield and density node to node. 

TSMC is way better. Over 30% higher density.

But that's because TSMC's 5nm process is supposedly insanely good.

 

TSMC N7FF - 96.5 million transistors per square mm.

TSMC N6 - 114.2 million transistors per square mm.

TSMC N5 - 173 million transistors per square mm.

Samsung 5LPE - 127 million transistors per square mm.

 

So TSMC N6 to N5 gets a ~52% density increase (somehow).

Samsung's 5nm is better than TSMC's 6nm process though (by about 11% density).

 

 

 

https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/samsung-foundry/8157-tsmc-and-samsung-5nm-comparison/

[Doobeedoo]

I can't wait to see what they do with a Cortex-X1 core and custom graphics they're working on.