To Face off against Qualcomm
Samsung Electronics will release a new application processor (AP) in December to face off against Qualcomm. Its previous APs failed to meet expectations due to performance and heat generation problems.
Flagship smartphones are launched one or two months earlier than before, from March to April in the first half and September to October in the second half to December to January in the first half and August to September in the second half. Samsung Electronics' Exynos 2200 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 898 (tentative name) are scheduled to be loaded into flagship smartphones in the first half of next year. The two companies started mass-production of their chips. A recent benchmarking test found that the Exynos 2200, which was developed by Samsung Electronics in cooperation with AMD, improved significantly compared to its previous models.
In 2021, the Exynos architecture went through bold changes as Samsung adopted an ARM CPU instead of an in-house product. Next year, the company will adopt a GPU from AMD instead of one from ARM. The AMD GPU performs 13 percent better than Qualcomm's latest GPU Adreno 650 and is ahead of A14, the iPhone 12 AP of Apple’s own development. Exynos technology was applied to the design of the Google Tensor chip for Google smartphones.
Samsung Electronics is planning to develop a mid- and low-priced AP Exynos 1200 for supply to Chinese smartphone manufacturers. Industry insiders are predicting that shipments of the Exynos will increase by 80 percent from 2021 to 180 million units in 2022. The Exynos was once considered better than the Snapdragon. However, it began to lose competitiveness after APs shifted to the system-on-chip form where a memory, a CPU and a GPU are put into one chip.
In particular, the Exynos 990, which was released in 2020, was shunned even for the Galaxy S20 series for the Korean market due to performance and heat generation problems. Samsung Electronics' global AP market share slid from fourth place in 2018 to fifth in 2019 and 2020, according to market research company Strategy Analytics (SA).