Samsung Believes in Samsung
Many Samsung (005930.KS) smartphones did not use Samsung’s own chipsets, including high-end flagship models. The top of the line Samsung Galaxy S21 5G models all contained a Qualcomm (QCOM) Snapdragon 888 chipset if it was sold in the US and China, while other regions received the same phone with Samsung’s own Exynos 2100 chipset, which would seem rather unusual, but has been the case for many of Samsung’s smartphones. In fact, much of Samsung’s smartphone line, including foldable use application processors produced by Qualcomm or Mediatek (2454.TT), and only Chinese brand Vivo (pvt) has released a few models with the Samsung Exynos chipset. It seems odd that Samsung’s self-produced chipset would not appear in many of its smartphones, as it assumedly would be less expensive than purchasing an outside AP, but there have been problems that have led to a low adoption rate for the in-house AP, and Samsung aims to change that going forward.
Things got so bad that a petition on Change.org in April of last year requested that Samsung stop using the Exynos processor on many international versions and consistently use the Qualcomm processor, as “The Exynos phones are slower, have worse battery life, worse camera sensors (a separate issue) and processing, get hotter and throttle faster, amongst other issues.” Comparison tests on sites like AnTuTu and GeekBench confirmed the weaknesses when compared (Exynos 990) to the Qualcomm 865 and Samsung’s share of the AP market has been declining and our quick check of the Exynos’s use in Samsung’s own phones seems to show a big push in 2019 and then a decline in its use in 2020 and this year.
One issue that has been cited for the problems associated with the Exynos AP is that Samsung had been using its own custom CPU cores (Mongoose) produced at its Texas facility, which as a single core outperformed Qualcomm, but when combined with other functions in the SoC, the package fell short in comparisons. Samsung closed its custom CPU lines at the end of 2019 and adopted ARM based CPU design, similar to that used by Qualcomm and others. Samsung has also been working with AMD (AMD) to improve graphics performance and will use AMD’s next generation graphics processing unit in the upcoming Galaxy S22 release expected in January. Samsung is also said to be working on a fix for the heat problem, which is caused by 5G communication chips.
The S22 is still expected to be released with both the Exynos and Qualcomm options, but Samsung is expected to increase the use of the next generation Exynos processor in a larger portion of its smartphone line, which is also expected to have a unit volume target that is ~20% higher than this year. While it is still early for setting 2022 targets, we expect some of the expansion of the Exynos AP is due to the shortages facing the semiconductor industry which could limit the availability of APs to Samsung. By using its own AP, it can bypass some of the issues that could arise in 2022, but the comparisons between the ‘new’ Exynos and both Qualcomm and Mediatek must be much closer if Samsung does not want to face continued criticism. By switching to ARM cores, they have narrowed the gap, but if they are going to expand the Exynos across the line, it better be as good as or better than the others.
Things got so bad that a petition on Change.org in April of last year requested that Samsung stop using the Exynos processor on many international versions and consistently use the Qualcomm processor, as “The Exynos phones are slower, have worse battery life, worse camera sensors (a separate issue) and processing, get hotter and throttle faster, amongst other issues.” Comparison tests on sites like AnTuTu and GeekBench confirmed the weaknesses when compared (Exynos 990) to the Qualcomm 865 and Samsung’s share of the AP market has been declining and our quick check of the Exynos’s use in Samsung’s own phones seems to show a big push in 2019 and then a decline in its use in 2020 and this year.
One issue that has been cited for the problems associated with the Exynos AP is that Samsung had been using its own custom CPU cores (Mongoose) produced at its Texas facility, which as a single core outperformed Qualcomm, but when combined with other functions in the SoC, the package fell short in comparisons. Samsung closed its custom CPU lines at the end of 2019 and adopted ARM based CPU design, similar to that used by Qualcomm and others. Samsung has also been working with AMD (AMD) to improve graphics performance and will use AMD’s next generation graphics processing unit in the upcoming Galaxy S22 release expected in January. Samsung is also said to be working on a fix for the heat problem, which is caused by 5G communication chips.
The S22 is still expected to be released with both the Exynos and Qualcomm options, but Samsung is expected to increase the use of the next generation Exynos processor in a larger portion of its smartphone line, which is also expected to have a unit volume target that is ~20% higher than this year. While it is still early for setting 2022 targets, we expect some of the expansion of the Exynos AP is due to the shortages facing the semiconductor industry which could limit the availability of APs to Samsung. By using its own AP, it can bypass some of the issues that could arise in 2022, but the comparisons between the ‘new’ Exynos and both Qualcomm and Mediatek must be much closer if Samsung does not want to face continued criticism. By switching to ARM cores, they have narrowed the gap, but if they are going to expand the Exynos across the line, it better be as good as or better than the others.
Smartphone Chipset Market Share 2020 - 2021 YTD - Source: Counterpoint
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