Qualcomm and Samsung announced the worlds first 10nm phone SoC today, the Snapdragon 835. Although details were not yet revealed, SemiAccurate thinks this chip could very well be 5 better than the 830 we were all expecting.
A few weeks ago when Samsung announced they were putting a 10nm phone chip into production, everyone assumed it was an Exynos of indeterminate number. You know what they say about assuming, and the proverbial ‘they’ were right, it was Qualcomm’s latest generation device. That is now official, there was a joint presentation where Keith Kressin and Samsung’s Jong Shik Yoon said it and held up the new SoC.
You can’t see it even if you zoom on the original, we tried
On the Qualcomm side details are non-existent but Samsung had a few goodies to share about their 10nm process. It uses 30% less area than their 14nm process, but this one is not the same BEoL trickled down from the 20nm process. So think of this 10nm node as the first fully ‘new’ process that follows the venerable 20nm node, 14 was just a transistor replacement.
It is a claimed 27% higher performance or 40% more power efficient with most designs likely targeting a middle ground of higher performance at lower power. When Qualcomm decides to unveil details of their new Snapdragon 835 chip, we will know which way the split went. Wherever the numbers end up, it looks like Qualcomm is the first out of the gate with a 10nm phone SoC.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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