Samsung Starts Production of its Second-Generation 10nm chips

Samsung Electronics’ S3 manufacturing line located in Hwaseong, Korea

Samsung is making sure that your current smartphone can shortly be passé by starting fabrication of its second-generation 10-nanometer chips. Dubbed 10-nanometer LPP, they will have 10 % higher performance or 15 % lower power consumption than this, 10-nanometer LPE chips. The Chips can be used on next-generation Qualcomm chips (rumored to be the Snapdragon 845) and Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus flagship phones.

The new 10-nanometer LPP chips are reportedly manufactured in much the same way as Samsung's current LPE wafers, so the little delay is expected for full volume production. Samsung has already qualified its 8-nm chips that, despite having smaller traces, are also manufactured in much the same way as its 10-nm processors.

By releasing 2 iterative versions of its current chips, Samsung is biding its time until it perfects 7-nanometer manufacturing, which needs the use of extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) lithography. because of that, increases in speed and power for your upcoming smartphone are expected to be modest -- around 10-15 % for each of the next 2 generations. Rival TSMC is supposedly ahead of Samsung in 7-nanometer chip manufacturing, creating speculation that Qualcomm might jump ship in the future.

Samsung gets a more credit for beating Intel in chip tech, but both companies are presently making modest gains, not doubling performance like we used to see. Intel has boasted, however, that it's 10-nanometer Cannon Lake tech will be a generation ahead of its main rivals, Samsung and TSMC, because it's packing more features into a similar area. both Samsung's 8-nanometer chips and Intel's 10-nanometer model's are alleged to go into manufacturing by next year.