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Exynos-8895

Qualcomm owns the lion's share of the premium and midrange mobile processor marketplace, but it could before long face a new competitor. Samsung has confirmed that information technology's talking to multiple firms, including Prc's ZTE, near selling its Exynos organization-on-a-chip (SoC) for utilise in phones, tablets, and other devices.

Nearly of Samsung'due south cash comes from selling memory chips to basically anybody. It might be able to replicate some of that success by unleashing its ARM SoC every bit well. Samsung operates the System LSI flake-maker every bit an independent enterprise, and so information technology wouldn't be unusual to sell parts to other firms. It certainly has the capacity to scale upwardly manufacturing to compete with the likes of MediaTek (which focuses mostly on midrange SoCs) and Qualcomm. The only other major thespian is HiSilicon, which makes the Kirin ARM chips, but this is a Huawei subsidiary that only supplies Huawei.

Y'all might non hear a lot most Samsung Exynos fries, but they're plenty common across the globe. Samsung uses Exynos chips in well-nigh of its flagship smartphones, except for those sold in the US. Those versions run Qualcomm Snapdragon chips instead of the Exynos. The only exceptions were the Galaxy S6 and Notation 5, which ran Exynos chips considering of Qualcomm'due south overheating issues with the Snapdragon 810. Currently, Samsung has only one third-party customer for Exynos chips, the Chinese smartphone maker Meizu.

Inyup Kang, head of Samsung's System LSI, says the visitor is talking to all OEMs. However, discussions with ZTE are perhaps the nearly intriguing. When the U.s.a. government banned ZTE from purchasing U.s.a. technology, it cut the company off from Qualcomm'south chips. ZTE could probably supercede other components, but there was not a comparable bit designer located outside the Usa. Samsung'southward expanded Exynos product could exist exactly what ZTE needs. Samsung has non confirmed any specific bargain with ZTE, and it'southward non giving it special treatment because of the Usa technology ban.

Exynos-M3

Similar Qualcomm chips, the Samsung Exynos is based on ARM designs. Qualcomm has traditionally made more than changes to the CPU core pattern, whereas Samsung used the reference designs. Still, Samsung'southward current flagship SoC (the 9810) has custom M3 CPU cores based on the 64-bit ARM architecture. There are four of those clocked at 2.9GHz, along with four low-power Cortex A55 cores clocked at 1.9GHz.

Samsung's SoC performs at least besides every bit comparable Qualcomm fries in almost tests and even beats it in some. Weak points include the GPU, an ARM reference blueprint that can't keep up with Qualcomm's Adreno GPUs. Writing to storage and web rendering work are also a bit slower on Exynos chips. Yet, information technology would be nice to take more competition for Qualcomm.