The Snapdragon 875, the chipset expected to be used in Samsung's Galaxy S21, may be manufactured by Samsung itself, raising questions about the fate of the Exynos chipset.

BusinessKorea reports that Samsung has begun production at a facility in Hwaseong, South Korea. The foundry uses extreme ultraviolet lithography to draw the patterns needed for the chipsets onto a silicon substrate.

Qualcomm, which designs the SoCs for the Snapdragon line, typically licenses TSMC to actually manufacture the chips. This year, however, Samsung Semiconductor made a better offer, reportedly resulting in orders worth between $850 million and $1 billion.

Samsung already designs and manufactures its own mobile chipsets in the form of the Exinos series. Unfortunately, the Snapdragon chips have historically outperformed their Exynos counterparts in benchmarks, although the difference is not great.

Currently, Samsung effectively controls the market in chipset production for the best Android phones, which raises the question of what will happen to Exynos. With easy access to Qualcomm's designs, Samsung may abandon development. Similarly, since the 875 is a flagship-level chip, perhaps Exynos designers will aim more for low- to mid-range chipsets for Samsung's cheaper phones like the Galaxy A series, and the Galaxy S and Galaxy Z series phones will all begin using Qualcomm chips worldwide.

Samsung owners in the US will not notice any changes due to this. In the US, Samsung is using Snapdragon chips in its phones due to an outstanding agreement with Qualcomm. In other parts of the world, however, users can get Exynos-powered phones.

The Snapdragon 875 (tentative name) will be the first Qualcomm chip to be manufactured in a 5-nanometer (nm) process. This means that it will be the most densely implemented chip Qualcomm has announced to date, and is expected to have more processing power and consume power more efficiently than current chips.

Apple will bring its first 5nm chip to market with the A14 Bionic in the iPhone 12 series, which will be available this fall.

Overall, the Galaxy S21 remains a bit of a mystery. We hear it may feature an improved 108MP camera and 60W fast charging. More importantly, for the first time in a Samsung phone, there is no camera notch and the selfie shooter is hidden under the display.