By Joining Forces with ARM and AMD
The tech giant has practically given up its strategy of developing a mobile AP on its own and turned to a strategy of partnering with ARM and AMD. As HiSilicon, Huawei's fabless (semiconductor design) subsidiary, is losing competitiveness due to U.S. sanctions, competition among Android AP makers is likely to be a two-runner race between Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics.
Samsung Electronics loaded the Exynos 990 AP on its flagship smartphone Galaxy Note 20 released for consumers in Europe and other regions. The Exynos 990 was also used for the Galaxy S20, which was released in the first half of 2020.
Some experts predicted that Samsung would use the Exynos 992 for the Galaxy Note 20, but it decided to use the Exynos 990. It did not release a new AP because it stopped the development of its own CPU in 2019 and little progress has been made in improving ARM's Mali GPU installed in the Exynos.
Samsung Electronics loaded the Snapdragon 865+, an upgraded version of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865, on the Galaxy Note 20 released for the Korean, American, Canadian, Japanese, and Chinese markets. The Galaxy S20 used the Snapdragon 865.
Samsung believes that a major contest among AP makers will take place in 2021. It has been working to release a much improved Exynos in 2021.
Samsung Electronics is working with ARM, which is called a fabless company for fabless companies, to develop a new CPU based on Coretex-X Custom. Previously, the Korean semiconductor giant had only purchased instruction set architectures (ISAs) from ARM to design CPUs, but now it is expanding its scope of collaboration with ARM to joint development of CPUs. Compared to its predecessor, Coretex-A, Coretex-X has improved performance by 30 percent.
Samsung Electronics is planning to overcome the Exynos' biggest weakness in GPU through cooperation with AMD. Due to the low-power Mali GPU, the Exynos had heat problems when used for high-performance games. Samsung Electronics is planning to surpass Qualcomm by upgrading the neural processing units (NPUs) and communication modems used for the Exynos. The company is planning to ramp up the number of NPU personnel 10-fold to 2,000 by 2030.
