Reports of Qualcomm’s change of heart, or should we say foundry partner, emerged three weeks ago. Now, Re/Code is reporting that its own sources, familiar with Qualcomm’s and Samsung’s plans, have all but confirmed the shift.

Samsung still in the lead

Qualcomm traditionally used TSMC’s cutting edge nodes for its flagship mobile processors. In fact, one of our sources claimed Qualcomm and Apple were the only reason TSMC went ahead with the 20nm node. The node did not see much use beyond three of SoCs from both companies and some minor orders from other chip designers.

This is the bottom line – Samsung just got there faster, rendering TSMC’s 16nm FinFET (16FF) process less competitive than expected.

Qualcomm is not the only mobile SoC outfit moving away from TSMC. It is rumoured that Samsung will also end up with the majority of Apple A9 SoC orders.

If you can’t beat them, join them?

Qualcomm’s current flagship, the Snapdragon 810, has already found its way into a number of flagship phones from HTC, LG, Sony, ZTE, Xiaomi and a few other vendors. However, Qualcomm lost Samsung, which is using its own 14nm Exynos 7420 in the new Galaxy S6 series.

While it may appear that Qualcomm is simply moving to a more competitive node, and will lag behind Samsung’s SoC designs, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Samsung still employs standard ARM cores and off-the-shelf graphics for its SoCs, while Qualcomm is planning to use a custom 64-bit core in the Snapdragon 820, along with in-house graphics and industry-leading integrated modem.

It’s been rumoured that Samsung is also working on custom CPU and GPU solutions, and the company has made a lot of progress in modem development as well. However, at this point it is unclear whether or not Samsung will have custom core designs anytime soon.