LG Electronics produces everything from washing machines to laptops. But up until now, the company’s relied on outside sources for a key component of its smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices such as televisions and smartwatches.
Now the Korea Herald reports LG plans to begin building its own processors.
LG will design the chips and they’ll be manufactured by TSMC. One of the first devices to use one of LG’s new chips could be the upcoming LG G3 smartphone, according to the report.
It’s also possible that LG could offer its chips to other device makers looking for an alternative to processors from Qualcomm, MediaTek, NVIDIA, Intel, and others.
There’s no shortage of low-power, mobile chip options these days. But companies like Samsung and Apple that design their own chips in-house have the advantage of being able to fine-tune the chips to meet their needs, and of developing software that’s designed to take advantage of specific features of the chipset.
LG hasn’t confirmed the specs for its new processors yet, but Phone Arena reports that it’s rumored to be based on ARM’s big.LITTLE technology and that it will be an octa-core chip with four 2.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A15 CPU cores and four 1.7 GHz ARM Cortex-A7 cores as well as PowerVR Series 6 graphics.