Samsung will manufacture 28nm Qualcomm Snapdragon chips

Yes, you read that right. Samsung, one of Qualcomm's main competitors in the business with mobile silicon, is going to help its rival produce the 28nm Snapdragon S4 SoC.

 

The reason for this is that Qualcomm's current manufacturing partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, better known as TSMC, can't keep up with the demand. As a result, Qualcomm has reached out to the biggest players in the business for help - United Microelectronics (UMC) and Samsung.

UMC is said to start producing the 28nm Snapdragon S4 chips in Q4 of this at the very earliest. However, it's unknown when Samsung will chime in and start the manufacturing process.

One thing is certain though - Samsung isn't happy that its own Exynos chips aren't as preferred as Qualcomm ones in the US because of their lack of LTE support, and more specifically the 700MHz band. As a result, it's swaps them for Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 solution in order to compete in the US market.

Source | Via

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Microsoft to use Snapdragon S4 Plus for Windows Phone 8

As we already reported, Qualcomm remains the exclusive chipset manufacturer for the Windows Phone platform. Today we got a little more details on the actual chips that will go inside the new Windows Phone smartphones, as Qualcomm confirmed they will be providing the future WP8 smartphones with their Snapdragon S4 Plus chipsets.

 

The S4 Plus uses two Krait CPU cores, clocked at up to 1.7 GHz and built on a 28nm manufacturing process. Along with those, the chipset utilizes an Adreno GPU of either the 225 or 305 variety. It features Bluetooth 4, 802.11n Wireless (2.4/5GHz), 3G and LTE radios and supports cameras with up to 20MP resolution.

The very first WP8 handsets to hit the market will use the Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 chip, but further down the road Microsoft and its hardware partners might launch devices with S4 Pro or even quad-core S4 Prime chips.

Source | Via

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Qualcomm butter benchmark proves Snapdragon S4 is “coolest kid on the block”

It’s no secret that the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 is the processor most sought-after by smartphone makers this year. Qualcomm has managed to cram some impressive performance numbers and LTE connectivity into the 28nm chip, making it one of the most efficient chips on the market.

One added benefit of the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 is the chip’s amazing heat efficiency. In order to show the difference between the heat expelled by the S4 chip and that of its competitors, Qualcomm could have simply taken thermal images of various devices while performing CPU intensive tasks. Instead, Qualcomm took a few sticks of butter and placed them on top of a few phones to see which device melts butter the slowest.

We’re not sure if Qualcomm is playing favorites in its butter benchmark test, but if you have a few spare phones running on different processors, you could easily run the butter benchmark on your own. All you need are at least two phones, a couple ziploc bags to keep your devices safe, and of course, some butter.

Check out the video below to see why “Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 is the coolest kid on the block – and we mean it literally.”

Source: HTC Source

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