Samsung is looking to become as independent as possible

Mar 18, 2015 12:34 GMT  ·  By

2015 marks an important change in strategy for Samsung as far as its in-house silicon production is concerned.

Until now, the Korean tech giant alternated between using Exynos SoCs and Qualcomm chips inside its flagships, but this year Samsung decided it was time to break bonds with the US-based chip maker and move forward by itself.

So now, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge make exclusive use of the company’s own Exynos 7420 chipset. Some voices said that Samsung used the purported Snapdragon 810 overheating rumors as a reason to push its own platform this year.

But the real explanation is that the Korean tech giant wants to become a self-sustained entity in the near future.

Samsung wants to depend only on itself

According to information coming out of Korea, Samsung is striving to build an application processor that takes advantage of its own cores and not of those supplied by ARM. The SoC is pegged for release in 2016.

Even if we’re calling the Exynos 7420 Samsung’s in-house chip, the silicone piece is not entirely produced by the Korean behemoth.

The architecture is realized using the company’s own 14m FinFET technology, but inside the SoC live eight ARM-designed cores.

However, Samsung has bigger plans than breaking bonds with Qualcomm. It also wants to leave ARM behind and design its own custom cores.

Sources familiar with the matter stated that the company’s Vice Chairman, Lee Jae-young, was heard saying that the company wanted to strengthen technology capabilities in order to design not only mobile devices but also semiconductors.

If Samsung finishes development of the new SoC in the early days of 2016, we might even see the Galaxy S7 flagship arrive with such a piece of silicone on the inside.

Samsung wants to make GPUs too

Samsung’s efforts for independence are advancing quite fast. Last year, a report came in saying that the Korean tech giant was also working on its own GPU products. Back then, we told you the GPU would arrive sometime around mid-2015.

Since we haven’t heard anything new related to the topic, it could be possible that Samsung has pushed the release of its own GPU platform for the first quarter of 2016.

Does Samsung really have what it takes to break free of Qualcomm, ARM and so on?