Samsung has often been criticized for its Exynos lineup of mobile SoCs. Recently, the chipset line was further under fire for being underpowered as compared to its rival Snapdragon 865. The Galaxy S20 series sold in most markets including Europe and India come with the Exynos 990 chip.
Despite all this, a report from South Korea says Google has partnered with the South Korean conglomerate for a custom Exynos chip scheduled to release this year.
Though fans and media have been suggesting Samsung to stop using Exynos chips on their flagship Galaxy S and Galaxy Note lineup of smartphones for years, the company seems to be have made a firm decision to continue doing it. By using in-house chips, the brand has been continually reducing its dependence on suppliers like Qualcomm and MediaTek.
In fact, Samsung is currently the world’s third-largest mobile chipmaker. Now, it has even signed a deal with Google to make a custom chip for the internet search giant. Even the alleged specifications for the same are out.
The chipset which is expected to release this year will be manufactured using Samsung’s 5nm LPE process. It will feature an octa-core CPU consisting of two Cortex-A78 cores, two Cortex-A76 cores, and four Cortex-A55 cores. The graphics will be taken care of by an unannounced Mali MP20 GPU based on Borr microarchitecture. Lastly, the custom Exynos SoC will include Google’s own Visual Core ISP and NPU instead of Samsung’s.
Last year, it was reported Google was poaching chip designers from Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and NVIDIA to build its own chipset for smartphones and servers. But for now, the above-mentioned custom Exynos chips looks to do the job as the internet company is expected to hire more engineers apart from the team of 16 engineers it already has in Bengaluru, India.
It is not known which device will be using this custom Exynos chipset first. It could be for a mid-range Pixel smartphone or even for its data center servers.
Additionally, Samsung ditched its custom Mongoose CPU cores for stock ARM CPU cores last year and has even partnered with AMD to bring Radeon GPUs to its chipsets. But there is still no information about the development of chips using the above configuration.
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(Via)
