Samsung Electronics is returning to the race to develop advanced processors for smartphones and computers by again developing its own cores for CPUs used in single-chip mobile platforms. According to Business Korea, the tech giant intends to reduce its reliance on Arm and plans to better compete with Apple, which uses its homegrown processors.
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Samsung Electronics recently formed an international team to develop advanced processor cores, led by Rahul Tuli, formerly AMD processor designer. CPUs are key elements of smartphone platforms and other compact devices. Samsung has been using cores from British Arm for its Exynos chips for a long time, but the new cores will be an in-house development. If the South Korean giant manages to create its own CPU cores, it is likely to have a strong positive impact on optimizing chips for the company’s devices.
Samsung itself is also accelerating the development of new-generation chipsets, of which CPUs are an integral part, for Galaxy smartphones, among others. In late 2022, the company’s System LSI Division, in addition to the Mobile Experience (MX) Division, organized the AP Solution Development Team to further optimize mobile platforms. Under the working title Galaxy Chip, a special chip is to be created that performs better than existing samples. The first version is expected to be unveiled in 2025. However, since the company has only just started developing its own cores, it seems that the first version of the conditional Galaxy chip will still receive cores on the ARM architecture. According to the publication, citing an industry source, Samsung will be able to use its own CPUs by 2027 if the development process is successful.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Samsung has attempted to develop cores on its own architecture. Since the early 2010s, the company has been building its own specialized team and investing in research and development. Back then, the project was called Mongoose (a mongoose is a snake-hunting animal) – notably, Qualcomm’s competitor used the name Krait (a type of viper) for the product name. Incidentally, Qualcomm uses ARM cores in its chips, but with additional modifications.
So far, however, Samsung’s mobile platforms have been more affordable than rivals like Qualcomm in terms of power efficiency, thermal performance, and multi-core efficiency. In the end, Samsung admitted that the Mongoose project was unsuccessful, suspended its implementation and cut it entirely in 2019, laying off more than 300 developers from the Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC).
Still, Samsung doesn’t stop expanding its presence in the chipset market, where Qualcomm dominates the premium segment and MediaTek dominates the mid-range and budget segments. In addition, according to Business Korea, the collaboration between Samsung and ARM is also at risk, not least because the company has accelerated the development of its own cores.
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