Samsung Electronics will be competing to produce more advanced chips to power smartphones and desktop computers. The company will also start a new program to develop cores to support central processing units (CPUs). The Korean tech giant will reduce its dependence upon ARM and fight Apple by loading its own CPUs in smartphones, tablets, laptops, and computers.
Samsung Electronics recently created an internal team for the development of CPU cores. Rahul Tuli was a senior developer at AMD who managed CPU development projects.
The core of Aps, which are the heart of smartphones’ application processors (APs), are responsible for data computation. For its Exynos APs, Samsung relied historically on British company ARM to supply the CPU cores. Samsung’s rival Qualcomm also makes APs based on ARM’s designs. Samsung will be able optimize its smartphones if it can develop its own CPU cores.
Samsung Electronics is also accelerating development of next-generation APs including chips for Galaxy smartphones. Samsung Electronics’ System LSI Division launched the AP Solution Development Team at the end of 2022. This team was created by the Mobile Experience Division (MX) to optimize APs. Advanced research is being done on next-generation chips by the team. The Galaxy Chip is the tentative name for the project. It aims to create a chip that is more efficient than the existing ones. According to industry insiders, the Galaxy Chip’s first version will be released in 2025. Samsung Electronics just began developing its own CPU cores. Therefore, it is very likely that the Galaxy Chip will feature ARM CPUs.
“If the development process is successful as usual, Samsung Electronics will be able to use its own CPUs by 2027,” an industry insider said.
Samsung has tried developing its own CPUs before. Since the early 2010s, the company has invested in technology to create its own design capabilities and built its own team of developers. Mongoose was the name of the project, after the snake-eating mammal. This was because Qualcomm, at the time, was using a krait (a type of viper) as a product name.
However, as Samsung Electronics’ mobile CPU cores were evaluated to be inferior to those of competitors such as Qualcomm chips in terms of power efficiency, heat generation, and multi-core efficiency, the company eventually concluded that their products were not competitive and put a halt to the Mongoose Project. The project was officially scrapped by the company in 2019, and more than 300 people were laid off at the Samsung Austin Research Center. Samsung Electronics has struggled since to expand its AP market presence. Qualcomm is the dominant mobile AP market leader, with MediaTek dominating the low-to-mid-range AP markets. Moreover, potential risk is growing over Samsung Electronics’ alliance with ARM. Samsung Electronics must accelerate the development of its own CPUs.