[ANALYSIS] Samsung Electronics adopting Apple's chip strategy

Industry

Published: 19 Mar. 2023, 15:58 Updated: 20 Mar. 2023, 13:43

[ANALYSIS] Samsung Electronics adopting Apple's chip strategy

Samsung Electronics President Roh Tae-moon, far left, shows off the Galaxy S23 devices to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, center, and Google Senior Vice President Hiroshi Lockheimer during its Unpacked event in San Francisco on February 1, 2023. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

Samsung Electronics is developing a new chip exclusively for Galaxy S devices, following Apple’s extremely successful silicon playbook.

It insists that it is not trying to go it alone on designing an entirely new microprocessor. Rather, the company is rejiggering the way it designs and makes chips for its devices so the semiconductors are built from the ground up for the phones they power.

A notable feature is that its phone-making division, not the chip design unit, is spearheading the project, following the underperformance of Exynos processors in recent years.

The Samsung Electronics smartphone division formed a team called AP Solution Development at the end of last year with Executive Vice President Choi Won-joon at the helm, according to multiple sources at Samsung Electronics. Before joining Samsung Electronics, Choi worked at Qualcomm and has expertise in modem chip technology.

“The company set up the team to make the so-called Galaxy-only chip led by employees from MX, although there are engineers from the System LSI division, which designs semiconductors,” a source said, using the acronym for mobile eXperience (MX) division.

Roh Tae-moon, president and head of the MX division, said last year that Samsung Electronics will make an application processor customized for Galaxy smartphones.

According to local media outlets, the team aims to integrate the new processor in the Galaxy S25, which will likely debut in 2025. A Samsung spokesperson declined to confirm the timeframe, although he confirmed the existence and head of the team.

Exynos chips were not solely designed for Galaxy phones as they are also supplied to Chinese manufacturers.

Until the Galaxy S22, Samsung Electronics had used both Exynos and Qualcomm Snapdragon processors to power the high-end smartphone models.

The manufacturer is only using Snapdragon application processors for the Galaxy S23, following overheating and slower-than-expected processing speeds of Galaxy S22 and S21 devices.

When producing Exynos, the smartphone and chip divisions worked more like separate companies, the sources say, which could cause the subpar performance.

“There was ‘a firewall’ between divisions, so it might be hard to produce the best result,” another source at the company said.

The mobile division would give the chip division specifications, and the chip division would design chips to meet the standards.

“But the AP Solution Development team is now trying to be more involved in the development from the beginning stage for better optimization of chips,” the source said.

The Exynos 2200, which is used in the Galaxy S22s, is based on a central processing unit (CPU) designed by Britain’s ARM and graphics processing unit (GPU) jointly developed with Santa Clara, California's AMD, although Samsung custom-manufactured the neural processing unit and modem chip.

Apple designs an in-house CPU by only licensing the essential instruction set from ARM, a strategy that allows the company to customize iPhones and iPads to match the features of its software. Using its own chip also allows for more control of the trade-off between speed and battery consumption.

Some media outlets speculate that the new team will work to design its own CPU core system without referencing ARM’s architecture template, but Samsung Electronics denied the report.

"A recent media report that Samsung has established an internal team dedicated to CPU core development is not true. Contrary to the news, we have long had multiple internal teams responsible for CPU development and optimization, while constantly recruiting global talent from relevant fields," the company said in a statement.

Reports came as Samsung Electronics is beefing up its efforts to hire high-profile chip engineers from Apple and AMD. Notable appointments include Lee Jong-suk, formerly a CPU engineer at Apple, as senior vice president at the MX division last year.

The Suwon, Gyeonggi-based company's Mongoose project commenced in 2010 to develop CPU architecture, but it suspended the team of about 300 engineers based in Austin, Texas, in 2019.

An executive at Samsung Electronics said that the company presently doesn’t have a plan to ditch a license partnership with ARM.

“We will keep licensing ARM designs for CPU,” the executive said.

“It is true that recent CPU architecture by ARM performed poorly, which contributed to affecting the overall performance of Exynos,” said Jeong In-seong, a semiconductor specialist and author of "The Future of the Semiconductor Empire."

“So, Samsung might acknowledge its vulnerabilities referencing ARM’s design,” he said, “But it is worth noting that Qualcomm is trying to be independent from ARM by employing its own CPU architecture for its Snapdragon processors. In that case, Samsung could be left with two choices, between ARM and Qualcomm, without directly engaging in CPU core development.”

Like Exynos, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have been built with ARM microprocessors. But Qualcomm announced that it will integrate its own CPU core — Oryon — later this year for Snapdragon processors. Like Apple’s chips, Oryon is based on an architectural license from ARM.

To make the project possible, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, a Santa Clara, California-based chip designer, in 2021.

BY PARK EUN-JEE [park.eunjee@joongang.co.kr]