Samsung to Jump up Its Application Processor Competitiveness

Samsung to Jump up Its Application Processor Competitiveness

Samsung Electronics is going to apply its own architecture platform to Exynos, a next generation application processor (AP).

It will be the first time for the company to develop Exynos based on its own architecture platform by redesigning the ARM cores. While most of the chip makers are using the ARM cores, there are only a small number of them including Apple and Qualcomm that have developed their own platforms after signing an architecture license with ARM. Therefore, Samsung is expected to drastically jump up its AP competitiveness.

According to the relevant industry on July 28, Samsung Electronics is developing a next generation Exynos that will be equipped with a redesigned ARM core platform led by Samsung Austin R&D Center (SARC). The development is expected to be completed early next year and applied to the company’s flagship Smartphone model.

The platform under development focuses on maximizing the bus performance between the CPU and memories such as DRAM and NAND flash, ensuring that its data-handling capacity and power efficiency are a lot better than the existing ARM cores.

The AP to which Samsung’s architecture platform will be applied is very likely to be a follow-up model of the recently-released processor, ‘Exynos 5 Octa Core’.

It is known that Samsung signed an architecture license with ARM two to three years ago in order to develop its own AP platform. Not only 32bit-based ARMv7 such as Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A19 but also 64bit ARMv8 architecture is included in the contract. The license on the 64bit core is believed to be used for the development of server CPUs.

It is not certain if Samsung would apply big.LITTLE to Exynos as it has had a hard time in addressing heat and design errors after it adopted the technology for its GALAXY S4.

big.LITTLE is a new technology into which Cortex-A7 that boasts low power consumption and Cortex-A15 that handles speedy processing are combined. For calling and texting, A7 is used and for videos, games and other fast processing operations, A15 is switched on.

“It is very positive for Samsung to improve itself from an initial stage of merely utilizing the ARM cores to the point where it deals with the architecture. A new architecture platform that would be equal to the one made by Qualcomm is expected,” says a source from the semiconductor industry.