Samsung is reportedly developing a custom processor for its flagship smartphones, but the chip won't be ready until 2023. The report comes several weeks after Roh Tae-moon, president of Samsung Electronics’ MX Business Division, announced this in a town hall meeting. Answering a question from a company employee about Samsung's plans to resolve the throttling controversy surrounding its Game Optimization Service (GOS), Roh said that the company plans to fix it by designing its own mobile chip that will be unique to Galaxy devices.
TM Roh's comment came in the aftermath of a massive throttling controversy involving Samsung's Game Optimizing Service (GOS), which was slowing down smartphones and tablets, supposedly to prevent them from overheating. However, the GOS was only being activated while running regular apps and games and not while running benchmarking apps. This allowed the devices to notch up high scores in benchmarks, although the devices were never allowed to perform at their peak abilities in the real world. Samsung eventually released an update that allowed users to disable the controversial system. However, the damage had been done by then, and Samsung's Galaxy S22 series, as well as the Galaxy Tab S8 lineup, were banned by Geekbench for manipulating benchmark results.
Samsung is reportedly looking to emulate Apple, Huawei and other leading smartphone vendors by designing its own custom mobile processor for its flagship smartphones. The company already makes Exynos-branded processors that power many of its smartphones in global markets, but the new chip will reportedly be exclusive to high-end Samsung devices and could well replace the Qualcomm and MediaTek chips found in the company's current smartphones. However, buyers will have to wait a few years to buy smartphones powered by the new chip. According to sources quoted by The Korea Economic Daily, Samsung aims to complete the design of the chip by 2023 before using it in new smartphones from 2025.
A Sense Of Crisis At Samsung
According to Business Korea, Samsung decided to develop its own application processor following "a sense of crisis" across its device solutions (DS) and mobile experience (MX) divisions. While the former makes the company's Exynos processors and is under pressure to improve its semiconductor share in the global market, the latter makes the smartphones and wants to expand its market share in the premium segment.
According to Counterpoint Research, Samsung is currently the biggest smartphone maker globally, with a 23 percent market share in Q1, 2022. Apple comes in at number two with an 18 percent market share. At the same time, Chinese smartphone vendors Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo round out the top five with 12 percent, 9 percent and 8 percent market share, respectively.
Source: The Korea Economic Daily, Business Korea, Counterpoint Research