It’s that time of the year again, a new Snapdragon flagship chipset is on the horizon, and as has been the case for quite some time now, it should be unveiled at the Qualcomm Tech Summit which, the company has now announced will take place from December 3 to 5 in Maui, Hawaii.
While we don’t really know much about the upcoming flagship Mobile Platform from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 865 will most likely be built on the 7nm EUV process from Samsung instead of TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process. It’s noteworthy that the Snapdragon 835 was the last chipset that was built using Samsung foundries, and the Snapdragon 845 and 855 have both been produced by TSMC.
The reason behind Qualcomm choosing Samsung’s EUV process is likely to be the improved power consumption in the chipset, and the 15-20% better area. Moreover, Samsung has already completed its development of a 5nm process as well, and that might very well be the process Snapdragon chooses to build its next-generation flagship chipsets on, but that remains to be seen.
Apart from that, it’s a safe bet to say that the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform will be made available in two variants, an LTE variant for mass market adoption, and a more expensive Snapdragon 865 with the Qualcomm X55 modem for 5G markets.
We’ll be at the Qualcomm Tech Summit in Hawaii in December, covering everything as it happens, so stay tuned and check back often to get the latest on everything that Qualcomm shows off at the event.
