According to a new report from Korea today, Qualcomm is still in talks with Samsung about the latter joining TSMC in making the former’s upcoming flagship Snapdragon chips. Qualcomm is expected to announce the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro later this month, and a lot of prior rumors have suggested that TSMC will be the only foundry making them.
However, today’s new report claims Qualcomm is still open to a dual-source setup with TSMC and Samsung. This is made possible by the fact that Samsung’s 2nm yields have improved lately, although they’re still trailing TSMC’s. Samsung has allegedly reached a production yield of around 55%, while TSMC’s yield is around 60-70%. That said, Qualcomm apparently requires around 70% at a minimum for large-scale contract manufacturing.
Qualcomm and Samsung are reportedly in the process of discussing “specifications, pricing, and process optimization”, but it’s still unclear what share Samsung would get of the total Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 production.
Then again, there are concerns about TSMC’s production capacity. The Taiwanese company is targeting 60,000 wafers per month of 2nm capacity by the fourth quarter of this year, but Apple has apparently snapped up more than half of that for its chips. So Qualcomm may have difficulty securing sufficient volumes from TSMC at some point, which is probably why it’s now talking to Samsung – as a backup option, not necessarily as a primary supplier.
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