Samsung Reportedly Speeds up In-House CPU Core Development, With Ex-AMD Senior Developer
There are some interesting rumors flying around in South Korea regarding Samsung’s ambitious new CPU architecture plans. pulse news Multiple unnamed industry sources have been cited for information about Samsung’s plans to reduce its reliance on the Arm architecture. The medium-term goal is to move laptops and smartphones from Arm to homegrown CPU cores by 2027. The project team leader is said to be a former AMD senior engineer.
Perhaps Samsung’s history of processor design hasn’t been all glorious. Despite its best efforts in recent years, Exynos processors have failed to shake their reputation for not being as hot and performing as poorly as Qualcomm’s similarly tiered Snapdragon processors. The decision to launch the Galaxy S23 flagship was the clearest sign that Samsung was fully aware of its rival’s superiority.
Of course, Samsung isn’t content to play second or third fiddle, so the company’s serious business minds have been plotting ways to turn the fortunes of processor development around. Samsung reportedly gave up on his internal CPU core development idea in 2019, laying off his 300 developers based at the Samsung Austin Research Center in Texas. However, from mid-2021 onwards, he is hiring engineers from AMD and Apple to form his new custom architecture team. In particular, Pulse News points out that the senior developer who was responsible for his CPU development at AMD now leads a team “dedicated to CPU core development.”
According to sources, Samsung is aiming to use its own CPU cores for both smartphones and laptops. The first processors based on this new R&D effort are expected to arrive in 2025, ditching the Exynos brand and calling it “Galaxy Chip(s)” instead. However, these first Galaxy chip offerings will likely continue to use CPU cores based on the Arm architecture. According to Pulse News sources, Samsung is only ready to roll out CPU cores with its own architecture by 2027 if all goes according to plan.
Designing a competitive CPU core without using the Arm architecture is a huge accomplishment for Samsung. That’s not the only hurdle to clear, but software compatibility issues also need to be addressed. It may also need to support some kind of emulation layer to smooth out the transition period, like when Apple went from Intel to Apple Silicon. This slows down the architecture’s performance gains.
If Samsung’s “proprietary” CPU design wasn’t an entirely new architecture, but instead used RISC-V cores, it could smooth out some of the expected software issues. announced Official support for RISC-V architecture processors began earlier this year. Getting Microsoft’s Windows OS on non-Arm and non-x86 notebook products is another challenge.
