14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung has its own foundries for various NAND chips and the like, but when it comes to most integrated circuits it has to rely on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Qualcomm thinks and hopes this will change.
Basically, Qualcomm hopes Samsung will drop some of the orders to TSMC and call on Globalfoundries instead.
Globalfoundries is a newer foundry, promoted by AMD but now independent.
An alliance between Samsung and GF would make it easier for Qualcomm to switch some of its outsourcing too.
Most of this is owed to TSMC's continued focus on 28nm, and how it has been rather slow in advancing to better process nodes, compared to the previous process technologies.
Ironically, this is a lot of business shuffling, or potential business shuffling, that won't really affect us regular people much, if at all.