[Pomfers]

Samsung's foundries have struggled for the past few years to achieve their targets, whereas TSMC has continued improving at their projected rates. TSMC's process is now significantly ahead of Samsung's, such that the same designs are better on TSMC. These improvements are along the lines of fewer defects, higher switching speeds, less leakage, etc.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was made on Samsung's fabs. The 8+ Gen 1 is the same design on TSMC.

To be clear, this is for Samsung's processor foundries. Their DRAM and flash memory still appear to be industry leaders.

[joecool1029]

It's not even a recent thing. Way back when Apple used both TSMC and Samsung foundries for their A9 SoC's, the Samsung ones were measured to perform worse than the TSMC ones. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/samsung-vs-tsmc-comp...

It's just the gap has become more noticeable in recent years. (Notably with things like the Snapdragon 888 handwarmer).

[birdyrooster]

To put it in perspective, the latest Tensor G2 is outperformed by the 2019 A13 Bionic in geekbench.