Samsung is reportedly working on a separate AP solution tailor-made for their Galaxy devices. There has already been a significant amount of hype generated about the upcoming Galaxy-exclusive chip (tentative name). This new chip is said to be significantly better than what the previous Exynos chips offered.
TM Roh, the president of Samsung MX (Mobile Experience) division, himself stated at an in-house town hall meeting last year, “We are thinking about developing a customized Galaxy AP.” This suggests that the Galaxy-exclusive chipset may be a customized form of the Exynos chips made by Samsung’s System LSI division, rather than a completely standalone piece of tech built from scratch.
At this point, it’s very likely to have this question – Why isn’t Samsung giving up on its Exynos chips?
The Galaxy-exclusive chip division is formed inside Samsung’s MX business unit, and the team is said to be working closely with the mobile devices. It should help with better optimization.
However, if we are looking for feasible improvements, especially in power efficiency, we need to look for changes in the current production line, particularly the fabrication process. This is because Samsung Foundry’s process nodes have historically been the biggest contributors to the power efficiency issues of Exynos chips.
But are there any significant changes in the production line?
Will the Galaxy-chip improve power efficiency?
The Galaxy-exclusive chip appears to be a customized version of Exynos 2500 and will be fabricated on Samsung Foundry’s 3nm (3GAP) process node. There are claims that the efficiency of this 3nm process should be comparable to that of TSMC’s.
Besides working on the Galaxy-exclusive chips, Samsung is also developing the Exynos 2400 chip, to power the S24 series in some markets.
This is where things get funny – every major Exynos chip appears to be drastically improved compared to the predecessor, but the hype barely holds itself to be true after the actual product comes out. Once, they even claimed to beat the latest Apple Bionic chip of that time, but in reality, it never happened. The track record doesn’t suggest hoping for a significant improvement, especially in power efficiency.
It’s also worth noting in terms of power efficiency that Samsung is working on a custom CPU design for future Galaxy-exclusive (Exynos tailor-made for Galaxy) chip which is set to come out not before 2027.
Core utilization improved?
The Galaxy-exclusive chip houses a deca-core system, as compared to the current octa-core norm.
Besides the process node, another important factor is the utilization of these cores. A tweak in the CPU governor can change a lot within the same semiconductor. The chip is being developed very closely to their mobile devices. So it’s expected to have better integration with the Galaxy devices. Most probably, MX’s president referred to this very thing by ‘customized Galaxy AP’.
We have seen this in the Snapdragon and Exynos variants of the S21 and S22 series devices. For example, the Exynos 2200 and the Snapdragon 8 gen1 are fabricated on Samsung’s 4nm process node, and they also contain the same ARM cores with mostly identical clock speeds. Yet, the overall performance and heating situation were still a bit better on the Snapdragon side (despite the prime Cortex X2 being clocked 0.2GHz higher on it).
It only suggests that the core utilization by the CPU governor was better on the Snapdragon side, which offered it an edge on the overall balanced performance and less temperature gain.
However, I should add that the Exynos 2200 was really close to its Snapdragon counterpart in terms of core utilization. It suggests that they are working on the core management. Likely, the upcoming Galaxy exclusive chip is expected to run the different clusters more intelligently, especially because of the close integration with Galaxy devices.
Will the Galaxy-exclusives chip be better than Exynos?
If Samsung’s 3nm process node meets industry standards, considering that Samsung has been investing billions in semiconductor manufacturing recently, the Galaxy-exclusive chipset may be significantly improved. This improvement will be particularly noticeable in terms of power efficiency.
The Galaxy-exclusive chip will comprise the latest ARM cores and will reportedly be fabricated using Samsung Foundry’s 3nm process node (3GAP). However, Samsung Foundry’s previous track record doesn’t suggest keeping high hopes for the chips to be power-efficient. In other words, the new Galaxy-exclusive chip is likely to be more of an iterative improvement than a technological breakthrough.
