Samsung is developing custom SoCs for Galaxy smartphones

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It was previously reported that TM Roh, president of Samsung’s mobile business, said at an internal meeting that Samsung would develop a custom SoC for the Galaxy series of devices. It is said that these SoCs will not necessarily stick to the Exynos brand, and it is uncertain whether they will use Arm’s Cortex cores or self-developed cores, and may even be jointly developed with Qualcomm or MediaTek.
Exynos 2200 Xclipse GPU
According to The Korean Economic Daily, Samsung may develop its own hardware and software at the same time, as Apple did, to create an entire ecosystem to fight its biggest rival in the smartphone space. According to people familiar with Samsung’s self-developed plan, Samsung’s first custom SoC is expected to be completed in 2023, but it will not be launched that year. Samsung plans to launch Galaxy series products equipped with self-developed chips in 2025.

It is rumored that Samsung’s ultimate goal is to use it in its top smartphones. The biggest difference from the current Exynos 2200 is that it no longer uses Arm’s Cortex core. This means that Samsung is likely to move in the direction of Apple, that is, to create its own cores with Arm’s instruction set, and divide them into performance cores and energy efficiency cores.

Some people in the industry said that the reason why Samsung chose Apple’s path to develop its own ecosystem is related to the huge pressure from Chinese manufacturers.

“Without its own ecosystem, something similar to Apple’s, it will be just a matter of time before Samsung falls behind Chinese companies,” said a local industry official.

In recent years, the Samsung Exynos series has not been as good as it could have been. Although Samsung partnered with AMD to develop Xclipse GPUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture, inheriting advanced graphics features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading (VRS) on PC platforms, the overall performance of the Exynos 2200 has not been improved.

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