GlobalFoundries to Manufacture 28nm Chips for Qualcomm

Back in late spring of this year we were debating on the likelihood that Qualcomm might contract GlobalFoundries to manufacture 28nm chips for them. TSMC was not able to meet the demand at the time and was also clearly not able to comply with future demand increase for Qualcomm’s powerful ARM chips.

Although Qualcomm proudly announced it has entered a 28 nm manufacturing agreement with Samsung and UMC, it seems that our Globalfoundries collaboration is also reportedly confirmed.

There is a huge demand on the market for Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Cortex A15 architecture, and TSMC, despite delivering good yields and having a refined 28nm manufacturing process, is not able to produce as many S4 chips as the market desires.

Now it seems that Samsung and UMC both are not nearly enough for what Qualcomm has in mind.

Readers must keep in mind that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 ARM CortexA15 mobile processor is not only used in phones, but it’s a powerful tablet and netbook computing solution as well.

There will be even more deals in the future, as big Qualcomm partners with S4-based designs – for example, HTC – have just entered huge markets such as the U.S. market and the demand will only increase.

The performance of Qualcomm’s “Krait” Snapdragon S4 ARM CortexA15 mobile processor is a bit higher than most quad-core Cortex A9 designs currently on the market, such as Nvidia’s Tegra 3.

There is one great performance advantage S4 has over CortexA9-based competition. The Cortex A15 architecture boosts twice the single-threaded performance of the CortexA9 architecture, and thus, all single-threaded applications will highly benefit from the improvements.

This move also shows that GlobalFoundries’ 28 nm manufacturing process ready for production and there is a strong chance that AMD’s 28 nm Richland APUs will come on time next spring, just as AMD needs them.