On April 7, South Korean media Inews 24 reported that it has confirmed that Samsung Electronics plans to develop an application processor (AP) specifically for its smartphone Galaxy. With the Galaxy S22 series recently embroiled in the Global Positioning System (GPS) controversy after the Game Optimization Service (GOS), creating a dedicated chip for Galaxy has become a breakthrough to cheer up performance and enhance the brand image.
At a town hall meeting last month, a Samsung employee asked "How will the GOS dispute be resolved?" Later, Lu Taiwen, president of Samsung Electronics' MX business, announced that he would build a Galaxy-exclusive application processor (AP). At the moment, Samsung Electronics is struggling to deal with the GOS (Game Optimization Service) controversy related to the Galaxy S22. GOS refers to the ability to optimize the state of your smartphone when playing high-end games to prevent overheating or excessive power consumption. However, Samsung Electronics has been criticized for installing this feature as mandatory, which degrades performance regardless of user wishes.
Lu Taiwen
In the Galaxy S22 series, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Samsung's Exynos 2200 are both equipped, and the yield problem of Samsung Electronics OEM production of the first generation of Snapdragon 8 and Exynos 2200 has been known to the industry. In addition, some Galaxy S22 users complain that GPS is not working. If a GPS error occurs, determine that the problem is with Exynos 2200.
But one thing to note is that the Exynos series is not a chip designed by Samsung specifically for the Galaxy. Tech blogger @Ice Universe explained that Samsung's System LSI division, which makes chips, doesn't have a very close relationship with Samsung's mobile division, called MX or Mobile eXperience. The two divisions are more like a buyer-seller relationship, with the Samsung MX division just one of the customers of the System LSI division, in addition to that, Samsung's chip manufacturing division not only makes chips for Samsung-branded phones, but also has other customers such as vivo, which aims to enhance brand reliability as a professional product of Galaxy.
In response to all this, Samsung is now likely to take the same approach as Apple when it comes to making chips — focusing on making chips that meet the needs of its Galaxy phones, rather than considering selling them to other manufacturers. Of course, Samsung may also cooperate with Qualcomm or MediaTek to produce new chips, but it is still uncertain.
While Samsung has been trying to elevate its self-developed Exynos chip to the same level as apple and Qualcomm's competitors, unfortunately, those efforts have failed so far. Two years ago, Samsung abandoned the Mongoose kernel in favor of ARM design, and Exynos once showed competitiveness, but the opponent was really too strong. At present, Samsung's latest flagship chip Exynos 2200 uses a GPU manufactured in cooperation with AMD, which is also pinned high hopes by Samsung.
In fact, Exynos' position in the application processor market is waning. According to market research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung Electronics' share of the AP market was only 6.6% last year. This is significantly lower than Qualcomm (37.7%), MediaTek (26.3%) and Apple (26%). In terms of performance, Apple's A series of bionic chips lead the world, and its products are at least 1-2 years ahead of competitors of the same level.
For Samsung, the first problem to be solved at present is not to benchmark apples in performance, but to improve the process and yield. Take the friend TSMC, at least let everyone mention the Samsung process, will not hesitate to vote for TSMC. In addition, Snapdragon 8 Gen1 and Samsung Exynos 2200 can indeed be said to have encountered Waterloo this year, not to mention that Apple is far ahead to the point of castrating its own chips, MediaTek with Tianji 9000, Tianji 8100 and other chips in the back, and has won a certain market reputation. Snapdragon 8 has been spat on by users due to power consumption, heat generation and various "negative optimizations", which is also a point that Samsung's self-research institute must pay attention to, and the heat dissipation ability is also the key to the success or failure of an AP.
But the good news is that if Samsung can really come up with "real skills", the future chip market will rise together, it will look much better.