Samsung’s chip division aims to increase the shipment of Exynos application processors by more than twice next year, reports ETNews.
It’s believed around 20 percent of Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones are powered by in-house Exynos processors at the moment, and the company’s share in third-party phones is now in single digits, down from the not exactly impressive mid-10 percent range in 2019. The client base is mostly limited to Chinese brands like Vivo and Meizu.
Samsung has ironed out issues that plagued Exynos chips
Initially recognized for their competitiveness, Samsung’s Exynos chips have been criticized for their performance, efficiency, and heat management problems. Now that the company has embraced Arm’s CPU cores, the performance of flagship and midrange SoCs have noticeably improved, and will likely get even better with the next generation. Fresh claims from industry insiders suggest 5G communication and heat issues have also been ironed out.
Samsung has also teamed up with AMD to make mobile GPUs and we will see it in action with the Exynos 2200 that will power the high-end Galaxy S22 series. A greater proportion of future mid-tier and entry-level phones will likely also feature home-brewed chips. The decision was partly spurred by the chip shortage.
Per today’s report, the plan is to equip around 50 to 60 percent of smartphones with in-house processors. To meet the goal, the company has reportedly started to expand facilities for related components and its partners also plan to increase investment to accommodate the plans.
What the report failed to mention is whether most markets will get an Exynos-powered Galaxy S22. Samsung was said to be dealing with some yield issues, and this prompted speculations that most regions will get the Qualcomm Snapdragon 898.
Samsung plans to ship 320 million smartphones in 2021
The report also claims that Samsung hopes to increase total smartphone shipments by 50 to 60 million units to 320 million units from this year. The company’s newest foldables are doing spectacularly well compared to older generations, but that alone might not compensate for falling flagship sales.
Samsung’s AMD-powered Exynos 2200 is reportedly based on the 5nm process. The version destined for the Galaxy S22 Ultra is believed to have one Cortex X2 core clocked at 2.9GHz, three mid-tier cores clocked at 2.8GHz, and four small cores running at 2.2GHz. The GPU has a frequency of 1250MHz.
It remains to be seen how it will stack up against competing chips that will power the best upcoming phones.
