Samsung has formed a new team to develop own CPU cores

Last year’s failure of the Exynos 2200 forced Samsung to rethink its smartphone chip strategy, not only restructuring the SoC business model, but also formulating a plan to enhance its long-term competitiveness, improve the competitiveness of Exynos chips, and address a series of issues and obstacles encountered in their development. Samsung’s move is not only intended to reduce its reliance on Arm’s public architecture but also hopes to compete with Apple and Qualcomm in similar chips.

According to Business Korea, the new team consists of members from the semiconductor and smartphone departments, and Samsung has also hired senior developer Rahul Tuli, who was involved in CPU project development at AMD. Samsung hopes to create chips that are not only suitable for smartphones but also for tablets and laptops, similar to Apple’s strategy.

Industry insiders have revealed that if the development process goes smoothly, Samsung’s first own CPU core can be used as early as 2027, a development work that spans four years. Before that, Samsung will try to provide customized chips for the Galaxy S series, but it won’t be seen until at least 2025.

Those familiar with Samsung’s chip development history know that this is not the first time it has designed its own CPU cores. After Qualcomm launched the custom Kryo core and Apple completed the self-developed SoC, Samsung also decided to develop its custom CPU core and launched the first Exynos 8890 based on the Mongoose architecture in 2015. However, after the release of the Exynos 990 in the Galaxy S20 series in 2019, Samsung stopped developing the Mongoose series architecture and returned to public architecture.

Currently, Apple is leading the competition in custom CPU core design by several generations. Qualcomm has only just managed to develop the new Oryon processor, codenamed “Hamoa,” finally seeing the dawn of custom CPU cores. Samsung still has a long way to go, but it has enough time for “trial and error.”