The rumors that appeared a few months ago about Samsung and its intention to create a new chip design team within the company seem to be becoming facts. Samsung seems intent on stepping on the accelerator on its own chip design, and even to go further and develop them as well. At least for mobile devices. To do this, it has created a development team for application processor solutions in the Samsung Mobile Experience (MX) division, which is dedicated to everything related to the company’s smartphones, among other teams.
This newly formed team, according to TheElec, is going to have in front of one of Samsung’s executive vice presidents: Choi Won-joon. This, in addition, has been appointed Head of Samsung Mobile Experience in the annual reorganization of his management, which had to be linked at the beginning of this month of December. And it’s likely that the application processor solutions development team was formed to design the company’s chips for the division.
It’s not the only team involved in chip design in the Samsung Group. Thus, within the Samsung system LSI division there is another team dedicated to chip design. In this case, logical processors, such as Exynos, which Samsung’s Mobile Experience division integrates into its range of Galaxy phones.
The reason why Samsung is opening another mobile chip development team is unknown. You may want to optimize your Exynos chips for your Galaxy range. Also You may want to, in addition to designing them, develop them and make your own processors from now on. But Samsung has not confirmed anything about its movements, so for now there is nothing fixed.
Choi joined Samsung’s mobile division in 2016. He joined from Qualcomm, and has a reputation as an expert in wireless chips, which will bring a lot of experience to the team. The application processor is the most important component of a smartphone, and is in charge of managing calculations and data communications. Basically, it is responsible for determining the performance and energy consumption of the phone.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s Mobile Experience division continues to use multiple providers for its phones. Among them are Qualcomm and Mediatek, in addition to the aforementioned division of the Samsung System LSI group. However, something may have begun to change in the company as a result of the performance problems that the Galaxy S22 phones had at the beginning of this year, which made it necessary to develop optimization software that purposely limited their performance.
The origin of these problems seems to be in the Exynos chips integrated in said smartphone model. In fact, for the Galaxy S23 Samsung has only chosen a Qualcomm Snapdragon model as a chip due to the problems of the S22.
