TSMC would hit another major milestone this year as its advanced nodes would allow smartphone chipsets to reach clock speeds up to 5GHz. Companies like Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple have already been greatly benefiting from TSMC’s cutting-edge technologies, and later this year, we’ll witness new chips reaching up to 5GHz of peak clock speeds for the first time in history, and that only makes it worse for Huawei to compete with.
Over the years, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple have grown strongly to offer powerful chips with excellent performance and efficiency, and TSMC has been at the center of it. The chart below (shared by Kurnal) shows how these companies have gradually increased peak clock speeds, now pushing toward the 5.0GHz mark.
The latest flagship from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, can already reach a peak speed of 4.61GHz, and the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro is said to reach 5.0GHz. MediaTek’s Dimensity 9600 Pro will reportedly achieve a similar feat, following the Dimensity 9500’s 4.21GHz peak clock speed. This increase enables SoCs to offer major improvements in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads.
Huawei’s Kirin chipsets, on the other hand, are nowhere near the performance and efficiency offered by Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple. Its downtrend on the above graph is due to U.S. trade sanctions that banned the company from doing business with TSMC. Huawei had no other option but to use China’s SMIC facility, which is still generations behind TSMC. Even today, SMIC is limited to the 5nm process because it’s restricted from using the most advanced EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography machines.
Huawei’s latest chip, Kirin 9030 Pro, hasn’t crossed the 3.0GHz mark. As things stand today, Huawei is still a long way behind Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple to even compete with them, and the difference is a foundry partner.
source/via: wccftech
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