TSMC has reportedly begun production of the Snapdragon 875 SoC using the 5nm process

TSMC has reportedly begun production of the Snapdragon 875 SoC, Qualcomm's next-gen flagship chipset. Qualcomm consistently announces its flagship 800 series chipsets towards the end of every year at an event in December. The Snapdragon 875 chip will supposedly arrive towards the end of the year and will likely start arriving on the next-gen Android flagships in the first quarter of 2021.

Like the Snapdragon 865, TSMC will also produce the Snapdragon 875 chip. However, Qualcomm is expected to use the semiconductor company's 5nm fabrication process for its next flagship 800 series chipset. The SD875 will be produced in TSMC's Nanke 18 plant. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 will be paired with the Snapdragon X60 5G modem. The X60 modem is also expected to be used on Apple's iPhone 12 series.

According to the report, TSMC's Nanke 18 plant has received orders from Qualcomm for anywhere between 6,000 to 10,000 5nm chipsets per month. The chipset will continue to use a 1+3+4 CPU arrangement. However, the Snapdragon 875 chip will use a powerful Cortex-X1 Prime core instead of an overclocked Cortex-A7x.

The Cortex-X1 promises a 30-percent peak performance as compared to the current Cortex-A77. The next three cores will likely be the Cortex-A78, which in itself is 20-percent faster and 50-percent more power-efficient than the Cortex A-77. The rest of the four cores will work on low energy consumption.

According to rumours, the new GPU used in the Snapdragon 875 will be the Adreno 660. If accurate, it will be based on the same architecture as the current Adreno 650 on the Snapdragon 865 chipset. Apart from Qualcomm, TSMC will be producing high-end GPUs for AMD and 5 nm A14 chipsets for Apple, according to a GSMArena report.