Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and MediaTek's Dimensity 9600 processors plan to directly use TSMC's more advanced N2P process nodes, striving to surpass their main competitor Apple in manufacturing processes.TSMC's next-generation 2nm node process has two versions, N2 and its subsequent optimized N2P. It has been previously reported that Apple's A20 and A20 Pro chips will use the first version of the N2 process.
The latest news points out that Qualcomm and MediaTek have adopted a "corner overtaking" strategy, skipping N2 directly and choosing to release their next-generation flagship chips on the N2P node with better performance.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen6 has been rumored many times to use the N2P process and support LPDDR6 memory and UFS 5.0 storage. MediaTek has been exposed to join this camp for the first time.
The reason why Qualcomm and MediaTek tend to adopt more advanced N2P processes is because they hope to gain a leading edge in manufacturing processes to make up for the gap in core design.
With years of independent research and development experience in CPU and GPU cores, Apple's chip performance and energy efficiency ratio have always been ahead of its competitors. For example, the A19 Pro's energy efficiency core has improved performance by 29% while maintaining power consumption.
In contrast, Qualcomm has only recently begun to carry completely self-designed cores, while MediaTek mainly relies on ARM's public version core design.
