Qualcomm Has Begun Sampling The 7nm Next-Gen SoC

Qualcomm has now announced that their next-gen Snapdragon processor will be a 7nm SoC that will support 5G connectivity and with it, it will bring the associated performance and power benefits over the current generation silicon we have available at the moment.

The announcement comes as a bit of a surprise, since the company didn’t really give sampling announcements in the past and also, silicon samples usually start 4-6 months before the device becomes available commercially. The whole industry as a whole seems to be running on 7nm these days, since Huawei has also announced just last week that their new Kirin 980 SoC will also be manufactured on the 7nm process node.

The 7nm SoC can be paired up with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem. Qualcomm expects it to be ‘the first 5G-capable mobile platform for premium tier smartphones and other mobile devices.’

Qualcomm has started to sample its upcoming flagship mobile platform to a number of OEMs that are currently developing the next-gen consumer devices.

Cristiano Amon, president, Qualcomm Incorporated has stated that the company is “very pleased to be working with OEMs, operators, infrastructure vendors, and standards bodies across the world, and are on track to help launch the first 5G mobile hotspots by the end of 2018, and smartphones using our next-generation mobile platform in the first half of 2019.”

The chipset will bring along Qualcomm’s AI-powering technology, which will basically allow for more AI smarts to be embedded into devices and run on them without depending on an internet connection.

So far, this is all we know concerning the chipset, though we expect more things to be revealed at the IFA 2018 next week.