Samsung reportedly pivots chip strategy; may take Apple's approach
Although Samsung has been trying to bring its in-house Exynos chip up to the same level as competing offerings from Apple and Qualcomm, the efforts have failed so far. Two years back, the company abandoned its Mongoose cores in favor of ARM's design, and its latest flagship chip, the Exynos 2200, features a GPU made in collaboration with AMD. The South Korean company is considering shaking things up to boost the performance of its home-brewed processors, suggests a new report.
Korean outlet Inews24 reports that Samsung is planning to develop chipsets exclusively for its smartphones. Leaker Ice Universe explains that Samsung's System LSI division, which makes chips, does not have a very close relationship with Samsung's mobile unit, known as MX or Mobile eXperience.
The two units have more of a buy and sell relationship, meaning the MX unit is just another customer for the LSI wing. Other than that, Samsung's chip-making arm doesn't just make chips for Samsung-branded phones but also has other customers like Vivo.
President and Head of Samsung's MX Business TM Roh has apparently said that Samsung will now make processors specifically for Galaxy phones. This plan was allegedly revealed during a town hall meeting when an employee asked how the company would resolve the game optimizing service (GOS) controversy.
GOS is an app that comes pre-installed on Samsung phones and is supposed to prevent the devices from overheating. That's done by limiting performance and Samsung was criticized for not allowing customers to disable the service. The company later shipped an update to address this but the whole saga left a sour taste in customers' mouths and there are some signs that this has affected the demand for the Galaxy S22, which is one of the best Android phones of 2022.
The highest-end model, the Galaxy S22 Ultra, also suffers from GPS issues, and this only affects the Exynos models, not the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-equipped ones.
To deal with all of this, Samsung may now take the same approach as Apple when making chips. That means it will focus on building chips that meet the needs of its Galaxy phones, instead of thinking about selling it to other manufacturers.
It's also possible that Samsung will team up with Qualcomm or MediaTek to make new chips, but nothing is certain at the moment.
Samsung has internally acknowledged that its employees "have insufficient AP capabilities" and that's not necessarily because they are lacking in talent, but also because of insufficient manpower.
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