Samsung bags contract to mass produce Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 865 chipset

Galaxy Fold aside, 2019 has been a pretty good year for Samsung. The company’s flagship Galaxy S10 series did better than last year’s S9 series, the revamp of the Galaxy A series and newly launched M series have made considerable headway in price-competitive markets. And, let’s not forget that the Note 10 Pro is yet to make an appearance.

But apart from being a very-capable smartphone manufacturer, Samsung is quite proficient at designing and manufacturing smartphone components like camera modules, chipsets, and displays.

According to new reports, the South Korean giant has bagged the rights to mass produce Qualcomm’s next flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 865.

This is not the first time Samsung has made a chip for Qualcomm. Samsung made the Snapdragon 820 and Snapdragon 835 for Qualcomm. However, 2018 saw TSMC, a Taiwanese-based semiconductor manufacturing company, build Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 and Snapdragon 855 for Qualcomm.

The South Korean giant seems to be making a return with Qualcomm believing the 7 nm ultra-violet (EUV) process Samsung uses is more advanced than TSMC’s technology.

According to previous reports, the Snapdragon 865 chipset will arrive in two variants, a standard 4G version with an LTE modem and a second variant with a Snapdragon X55 5G modem. Apart from Qualcomm, Samsung has also manufactured chipsets for Apple in the past and don't forget the in-house Exynos chip.

Samsung foundries will also produce GPU chips for Nvidia, which has used TSMC for years. However, despite losing contracts from Qualcomm and Nvidia, TSMC is far from out of the fight.

The chipmaker will produce the A13 Bionic and Kirin 985 chipsets, which will power the next generation of iPhones and flagship Huawei devices, respectively. While Samsung already uses some of AMD’s chips, the semiconductor company is sticking with TSMC for the next-gen Ryzen chips based on Zen-2 architecture and the RDNA-based RX5700 series cards.