Samsung blames S25's Exynos 2500 troubles on too short of a workweek
Samsung is having trouble lowering the production costs of its Galaxy S25 family of handsets, as it may not be able to achieve enough yield of its homebrew Exynos 2500 processor.
At about $150 apiece, the Exynos is much cheaper than Qualcomm's $250 Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4) that it will now be forced to use for all Galaxy S25, S25+, and 25 Ultra units. Samsung's foundry, however, operates with 10 times less personnel than juggernauts like TSMC, whose second-gen 3nm process node Qualcomm uses to craft the Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4) chipset.
In a rather funny turn of events, a senior engineer at Samsung’s mobile application processor development team now blames the government's mandated 52-hour work week as the culprit behind those constant Exynos 2500 delays.
There have been many times in recent years when I had to leave work unfinished and go home because of the 52-hour limit, even though a project deadline was approaching, Because of this, some key employees sometimes work off the clock, so their extra hours aren’t recorded by the company.
Samsung foundry engineer, November '24
Needless to say, other Korean chip companies like SK Hynix have no issues with the "too short" of a workweek in the motherland, yet Samsung is far from the only big local company that complains that 52 hours a week is too short of a timeframe to complete all tasks.
Korean labor laws allow people to work for the standard 40 9-5 hours, then amass up to 12 hours overtime, and that's that. Companies have been increasingly encouraging upper ranks to work more, though, asking middle managers to come six days a week sometimes.
As recently as 2018, the labor laws in South Korea allowed people to work 68 hours in a six-day workweek that was seen as pretty much standard. It seems hard for Samsung to shake those habits and fulfil its foundry projects on time with the new labor laws and the employee power on hand.
The Galaxy S25 series already got benchmarked both with an Exynos 2500 and a Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4) processor, so the chipset design seems done. Samsung's foundry, however, is still producing up to 70% discards, which is a rather unacceptable rate when it comes to supplying enough chips for the Galaxy S25 line that is likely to sell in the millions.
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: