Samsung would stop improving its Exynos with custom cores

For a company like Samsung, competition is not only in smartphones but also in many other devices, devices and even buildings. In addition, the South Korean company manufactures a good part of the components of its mobiles, also the phones of others: from the screen to the battery; going through RAM, storage and even the processor. This multiplicity implies remarkable efforts that may not be rewarded.

When manufacturing a multiprocessor or SoC (System on a Chip), each manufacturer can choose to develop their own architecture (really complex) or take advantage of that of a company that licenses its use. This is the case of ARM, the most used processor architecture in the mobile segment. And as developing improvements on such architecture is expensive and laborious, Samsung has decided to do without that division to give a complete turn to its Exynos.

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Samsung closes its Custom core development division for Exynos processors

Companies like Qualcomm adapt the ARM architecture to enhance the characteristics of their processors based on improving the design. It is what is known as custom cores or Custom Cores: improved chip architectures to offer more performance, lower consumption and a greater variety of functions. Qualcomm's Kryo cores are a sign of the potential of improving the basic architecture of ARM.

Until now Samsung customized the cores of its Exynos processors with the so-called M. cores. And we say so far because Samsung has confirmed that it closes its custom core development division based in Austin, Texas. Around 290 people will lose their jobs; maintaining another 3000 workers of the same complex who were engaged in other developments.

Samsung has not officially confirmed that it will stop developing Custom cores, but it would be the most logical since it has closed the division that was dedicated to it. This would imply the use of licensed and unmodified ARM architecture for its next Exynos SoCs beyond 990. This would be the last in the family that could integrate custom M cores.

Apart from the CPU, it remains in the air how Samsung will deal with its agreement with AMD to integrate Radeon GPUs into Exynos. It currently uses an ARM architecture without customizing GPU (Mali), but this should change in the future. We will see which phones will be the first to receive the new generation Exynos: the safest is that the Galaxy S11 integrates the latest Exynos 990 or a possible Exynos 9830.