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back to article Qualcomm taps Samsung to make next-gen 10nm Snapdragon

The latest and greatest Snapdragon processor, the 835 due out in the first half of next year, will be made by Samsung and be the first to use the chaebol's 10-nanometer FinFET architecture. The announcement was made at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in New York and extends the partnership the two firms have had for …

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  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    sounds like a fruity company does it not?

    Cutting down on the chip size is going to be key for some manufacturers, who are prepared to cut out anything that makes our smartphones and fondleslabs a few extra millimeters thinner.

    I wonder if they think that Apple will want to buy their chip for the next iDevice or have they been infected by the Apple RDF?

    0 0 Reply
    1. Captain Scarlet
      Reply Icon

      Re: sounds like a fruity company does it not?

      Apple design and customise a version of the ARM processor to their own requirements so I doubt they would.

      3 0 Reply
  2. Mage Silver badge
    Coat

    Chip size and thinner?

    Nothing much to do with chip size, more to do with skinnier screen assemblies, thinner batteries. Even Apple's excuse about the 3.5mm jack socket is a lie.

    Really in terms of battery and loudspeaker (if not holding it to ear, and I see LOADS of people using their phones ST-TOS style) and being robust the phones need to be fatter. Even 10mm is fine. Less than 8.5mm is a fashion statement, not sensible. People want better battery life and more robust, not thinner. No-one should need buy the stupid bumper covers, that's an indication of design failure. I've never used one, though I got one included with last phone.

    Also the chip shrinkage rarely ever affects THICKNESS, but the PCB area. The Samsung SC6400 family ARM (variant in original iPhone) allowed easy design with no external PCB traces to Flash memory and RAM, as it had the RAM and Flash chips inside the package, piggy-backed. Not possible on Intel in even 2008. Even that design would let you make a 6mm thick phone.

    AMOLED saves some thickness as there is no polariser, no rear/edge diffuser/lightpipe/LED illumination arrangement and the actual bare panel is skinnier than an LCD. Shorter life though as it's not LEDs in the conventional sense but more like an EL panel.

    8 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Chip size and thinner?

      "People want better battery life and more robust" is not universally true. Some people like you want that. Others like me find that battery life is more than I need (I typically charge my 6S plus every other day, so long as the first day doesn't take it below 60-65%) and robustness is rarely an issue with thinness at least as far as bending goes. Making a thicker phone isn't going to make it better at surviving drops unless you use that thickness to build ugly bumpers into the phone instead of adding battery. Obviously there's a market for tough phones, or cases to survive tough environments like construction, but those are niche markets. Thinner phones with smaller batteries weigh less, especially at the large sizes of today's phones, so I'm all for making them even thinner if it further reduces the weight and they don't bend.

      I agree with you about chip thickness. I constantly see that mentioned, but it is silly. Apple used InFO packaging for the A10 which made the package slightly thinner than their previous SoCs but the big win was stacking the DRAM and Flash with higher speed and higher pin count interfaces than in a traditional stack, so the logic board is presumably now smaller as a result.

      AMOLED is still a compromise, and I'm hoping something comes of Apple's purchase of Luxvue. They claimed to have cracked the problem of manufacturing inorganic LEDs. Supposedly they use less power, have greater brightness, longer lifetime and eventually larger color gamut. I keep wondering if the rumors of Apple switching to OLED are really Apple switching to this, but maybe they found they couldn't make them cost effectively or at a high enough yield yet and they will go with ordinary AMOLED eventually now that it can be bright "enough", even if not as bright as iPhones currently are.

      1 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Quick Charge 4 is merely compatible with USB-C

    It is still proprietary, but it meets Google's new Android requirement of compatible with USB-C power delivery standards. It will still violate USB standards when connected to a QC4 charger, but it will work when connected to a USB-C charger (and charge at normal USB speeds only)

    0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bug bounty

    Because they have finished their top to bottom full code review programme, and the last of the patches landed this month.

    This is because they believe they are now ontop of it, not because they need to....

    Nice try....

    0 0 Reply
  5. Arctic fox
    Flame

    "will give it a 27 per cent performance increase or cut power consumption by 40 per cent"

    Anyone betting against the phone manufacturers expending very little of that on improved battery life?

    0 0 Reply

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