Leak points to Snapdragon 855 as first 7nm chipset

In an article Android Authority posted in April last year, we asked a simple question: “Who will be the first manufacturer to 7nm?” Well, a contractor for Qualcomm may have answered our question, as Roland Quandt from WinFuture.de detailed in a recent tweet. According to Quandt, the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset, the Snapdragon 855 (SDM855), will be the very first commercially-released 7-nanometer processor.

7nm refers to the half-pitch measurement of nodes in a chip. In other words, if you were to measure the amount of space between a node and its closest node neighbor, and that measurement was 14 nanometers, you would have yourself a half-pitch of 7nm.

Processors in current flagship mobile devices like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and imminent flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S9 have 10nm chips. Because nodes will be ever-so-slightly closer together on a 7nm chip, the processor will be denser and thus able to be faster while using less power.

If what Quandt says is true, we could see 7nm chipsets in flagship mobile devices as early as 2019. But, as with any leak, information needs to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, Roland Quant has uncovered plenty of reliable information in the past, but his source is a blurry screenshot from… somewhere. It’s not at all clear where he pulled the text from that claims the Snapdragon 855 will be the first 7nm chip, nor who wrote the text. Also, the image he posted doesn’t say anything about timelines or system capabilities; it merely says the SDM855 will be a 7nm chip.

Still, 7nm technology will be a big boost for the smartphone industry, giving us faster processing with much less power consumption, which is certainly very exciting.