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LG might be working on a custom-built mobile chip set to ship with the company’s high-end smartphones.
A report (via GForGames) citing comments from Korean industry insiders says LG has considered creating an in-house chip to directly compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series.
What’s more, the new SoC will make use of ARM’s new Cortex-A72 processor designs, which will mark the chip as distinctly flagship-bound.
The four Cortex-A72 cores will be paired with four Cortex-A53 cores using ARM’s big.LITTLE processor configuration, and will land with a Mali-T880 GPU also built into the SoC.
The CPU will allegedly be built by TSMC using a 20nm manufacturing process. This is interesting, because Samsung has just confirmed its own in-house high-end Exynos chip will use a more efficient 14nm process, seemingly putting LG behind before it’s even started.
Related: ARM Cortex A72: Performance, specs, and what it means for the future
According to the reports, this is the third chip LG has considered. The first –the NUCLUN – actually landed on the LG G3 Screen, and didn’t go down too well.
The second was intended to be a direct Snapdragon 810 rival, and would feature four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. This was scrapped apparently, however, due to technical issues.
It’s worth noting that ARM’s Cortex-A72 processor is destined for 2016 smartphones, so we probably won’t see LG’s chip offering in any of this year’s handsets at least.
LG will likely stick with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips for its 2015 flagships, with the LG G Flex 2 already confirmed to be carrying the Snapdragon 810.