Following in the footsteps of Apple and Samsung, LG is going to design its own smartphone and tablet processors.

The Korea company has teamed up with Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, and according to a source familiar with its plans, the upcoming G3 flagship will be LG’s first smartphone powered by an in-house processor.

Apple first launched its own processor back in 2011 when it announced the original iPad, which was powered by the single-core A4 processor. All of the Cupertino company’s iPhones and iPads have been powered by its own A-series chips ever since then. The iPhone 5s debuted the first 64-bit chip, the A7, last September.

Samsung has also been developing its own Exynos chips, which can be found inside a number of Galaxy-branded smartphone and tablets. However, the company continues to rely on Qualcomm’s hugely popular Snapdragon CPUs to power the vast majority of its mobile offerings.

Like Samsung and many others, LG has long been reliant on Qualcomm chips, too — but that’s about to change. The company has confirmed to The Korea Herald that it will soon begin mass-producing its own mobile processors.

That’s all LG would confirm at this point, but sources familiar with its plans say the chips will be manufactured by TSMC. They’re expected to go into mass production during the second quarter of 2014, and could feature in LG’s upcoming G3, the successor to its flagship G2.

In addition to reducing costs, one of the advantages companies have when designing their own chips is the ability to fine-tune and optimize each one for their own devices. For example, they can make power efficiency the priority for midrange devices, and performance the priority for high-end ones.

• SourceThe Korea Herald