[News] Qualcomm Says Announced 2nm Chips Will Use TSMC, Keeps Door Open to Samsung Foundry

Samsung Foundry’s efforts to secure major customers have been closely watched, with the possibility of future cooperation with Qualcomm remaining open. According to Chosun Biz, Chris Patrick, Qualcomm senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, said the company is likely to work with suppliers that offer strong technology, while emphasizing its partnerships with both Samsung Foundry and TSMC. His comments do not confirm that Qualcomm will adopt Samsung’s 2nm process, but the company has not ruled out Samsung as a foundry partner for future products.

For now, however, Patrick confirmed that all 2nm products Qualcomm has announced will be manufactured by TSMC, as the report points out.

New 2nm Snapdragon Chips Push Mobile CPU Past 5GHz

Those 2nm products are now taking shape in Qualcomm’s latest flagship mobile lineup. According to a separate Chosun Biz report, Qualcomm unveiled two new 2nm flagship mobile APs, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Both feature Qualcomm’s next-generation in-house Oryon CPU, which uses two prime cores and six performance cores and is the first mobile CPU to exceed a maximum clock speed of 5GHz.

The higher-end platform also brings a major graphics upgrade, with its latest Adreno GPU delivering 44% higher performance than its predecessor. Qualcomm has also added dedicated AI capabilities to the GPU to improve graphics processing and efficiency.

On-device AI is another major focus of the new generation. The upgraded Hexagon NPU, combined with UFS 5.0 and intelligent flash memory management, enables MoE models with more than 30 billion parameters to run directly on smartphones, Chosun Biz notes. Qualcomm has also upgraded its Sensing Hub to process voice and surrounding context continuously at low power, supporting features such as speaker recognition and personalized AI agents.

The first devices powered by the new chips were also unveiled, with Xiaomi introducing its Xiaomi 18 Pro series. The company plans to use the two new Snapdragon platforms across different products and roll them out globally within the year, according to Chosun Biz.

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(Photo credit: Qualcomm)