Samsung aims to beat Qualcomm as the top Android application processor maker

Samsung is said to be cooperating with ARM and AMD to outrank Qualcomm as the No.1 Android AP maker. 

The plan to improve CPU and GPU performance of Exynos

Partnership with ARM and AMD to outrank Qualcomm

The South Korean tech giant is targeting to become the best among Android application processor makers by producing a  mobile AP which has better CPU and GPU performance. By teaming up with  ARM and AMD, it basically has given up in making a mobile AP on its own.

Meanwhile, its competitor HiSilicon lost its edge because of the United States' restrictions on Huawei. This means Qualcomm remains its strongest rival in this category.

For Europe and other regions, Samsung Electronics equipped its flagship device Galaxy Note 20 the Exynos 990 AP whereas the Galaxy S20 runs on an Exynos 990 chipset. There are predictions that Samsung would use Exynos 992 for the Galaxy Note 20 but it was not able to launch a new AP as it already halted its own CPU development last year.

According to the company, the competition among AP makers will start by 2021 so it has been working on improving Exynos to release it by that time. Together with ARM, Samsung is developing a new CPU based on Cortex-X Custom. 

Before, it only availed instruction set architectures (ISAs) from ARM to design CPUs. This time, they work as a team to achieve their goal. Reportedly, Cortex-X was able to increase performance by 30 percent as compared to Cortex-A.

Based on the source, Samsung is aiming to be successful in addressing  Exynos' biggest weakness in GPU by its partnership with AMD. The Exynos encountered heat problems when used for high-performance games because of the low-powered Mali GPU.

Moreover, the tech giant has an objective to beat the said competitor by upgrading the neural processing units (NPUs) and communication modems of the Exynos processors. With this, it is said to the company is to hire more NPU personnel ten times its current total up to 2,000 by 2030.

Do you think Samsung will succeed?

Sources: Business Korea, Android Central