TM Roh, the president of the MX division at Samsung Electronics, said at an in-house town hall meeting last year that they are thinking about developing a customized Galaxy AP.
Samsung making chips for their Galaxy devices themselves isn’t new, though. We are all familiar with the Exynos chips, which have been their aspiration. However, technical limitations have held back the achievement they have hoped for years. Now here arises a question – How the Galaxy-exclusive chip is better than exynos?
Samsung making chips for their Galaxy devices themselves isn’t new, though. We are all familiar with the Exynos chips, which have been their aspiration. However, technical limitations have held back the achievement they have hoped for years. But now, it seems that there’s a new contender in the semiconductor business from Samsung.
Here arises a question – How is the Galaxy-exclusive chip better than Exynos?
Samsung Electronics formed a new AP (Application Processor) Solution Development Team inside their MX (Mobile Experience) business unit in December of last year. The team is led by the Vice President of Samsung MX, Choi Won-Joon, a former Qualcomm executive.
We may see the first generation of the Galaxy-exclusive chip inside the S25 series in 2025.
Galaxy exclusive chip: the exclusive development
Samsung Electronics recently appointed Lee Jong-seok, who was in charge of Apple’s in-house chip design work, as an executive in the Mobile Experience (MX) business unit. He will lead the AP (Application Processor) architecture group within the AP Solution Development Team in Samsung MX. His previous experience in the field is expected to bring value to Samsung’s new dream chip.
Reportedly, the AMD Radeon and Google Tensor Teams are also working with Samsung on this chip project, indicating the second generation Xclipse GPU along with Google Tensor’s AI capabilities sprinkled on top. The goal is to optimize the chips solely for Galaxy devices and improve the user experience, which wasn’t possible with Exynos.
Samsung is also working on a custom CPU design for the chips, but this project will not be ready until 2027. Therefore, the first generation of the Galaxy-exclusive chip will be based on ARM cores and fabricated on Samsung Foundry (same as Exynos). From this point of view, I’m a bit skeptical about the prospect of the Galaxy-exclusive chips standing out from Exynos.
Different enough form Exynos?
ARM cores implemented by Samsung Foundry.
The new Galaxy-exclusive chips will be fabricated using the same Samsung Foundry that was the biggest contributor to Exynos’s power efficiency issues. However, there is a new 3nm (3GAP) process node under development that will be used to fabricate the chips. It remains to be seen if their 3nm process node will show any reasonable improvement in terms of power efficiency.
This Galaxy-exclusive chip project seems to primarily focus on optimizing the Galaxy lineup of devices and is expected to bring incremental improvements over the existing Exynos chips. Yes, it’s basically the successor to Exynos chips created with Galaxy devices being the focus.
The first-generation exclusive chip from Samsung MX is speculated to be the Exynos 2500 with some additional work and hype added to the name. The Galaxy chip may not be a standalone project but backed up by System LSI with its own personalization.
In short, it’s basically a successor to the Exynos, only with a different name. There will surely be certain improvements, just like in the past two generations, but it’s not something that requires and deserves a new branding.
