Exynos, Samsung’s own custom chipset, would normally be expected to power the majority of the South Korean company’s mobile phones, but this has not been the case, especially in recent years.
Samsung used to prefer Qualcomm or its in-house Exynos chipsets for the high-end smartphones, with the United States and China getting Snapdragon variants while the rest of the world would get Exynos models, which have been cited as being weaker in performance.
Exynos chipsets have been facing two troublesome issues: overheating and quick battery draining.
It seems like Samsung has finally found a way to address the issue, according to ET News, a Korean online magazine.
“I know that the 5G communication and heat issue, which were the most problematic issues in Exynos, have been resolved in the next production,” An insider speaking to ET News is quoted saying.
Issues with Exynos chipsets’ performance led to a massive drop in their uptake, especially when compared to Qualcomm, dropping from an Electronic’s AP share of 14% in Q1 2020 to just 7% in Q2 2020.
Samsung, working in collaboration with AMD, looks like they have found a way to improve graphics performance and solve the heat issue caused by 5G communication. In-yeop Kang, president of the System LSI Division, is quoted to have said, “The next flagship product will be equipped with AMD’s next-generation GPU.”
The Korean magazine reports that Samsung is pushing for a rise in the proportion of Exynos chipsets installed in Galaxy smartphones from 20% to 50-60%, effectively doubling the installation base of the Exynos chipsets.
The Exynos chipsets will be pushed to more midrange and low-end smartphones than ever before, a significant shift, as Samsung in the recent past preferred to ship budget phones with Snapdragon or MediaTek chipsets. This would create fertile ground for the Exynos chipsets to claw back some market share from the other two aforementioned chipsets.
Despite Samsung releasing mid-range Exynos chipsets in the past, they never made their way into budget Samsung smartphones. A good case in point is the Exynos 1080 which was, instead, used in Vivo phones despite offering performance that is equal to the MediaTek Dimensity 1200 SoC and Snapdragon 780G.
Samsung’s push for more utilization of the Exynos chips could be a result of the chip shortage that has caused havoc for smartphone manufacturers. By shifting focus to Exynos chips, Samsung would in turn have more control over the production and supply of these chipsets, unlike when dealing with third parties in Qualcomm and MediaTek.
ET News adds that Samsung is hoping to ship 320 million units of smartphones in 2022, an increase of around 60 million units from this year. However, Samsung representatives are still coy about their chances of achieving that target, “We cannot confirm the plans for next year’s smartphone and AP business.”
AMD has had a resurgence in the PC scene with their Ryzen processors outperforming Intel ones, especially in workloads utilizing a lot of cores such as rendering, video editing and the likes.
If this success on their famed 5 nm process can be translated to the Exynos chips that they are working on in collaboration with Samsung, then we are bound to see some impressive jumps in performance in the near future.
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