You think Samsung can deliver a Snapdragon beater

It emerged last week that Samsung has apparently formed a chip development team inside its mobile division. This would be a departure from the norm, as the mobile division currently relies on a sister division for its custom smartphone processors.

This news got us wondering whether readers thought Samsung would be able to develop a Snapdragon-beating mobile chip. We posed this question last week, and the results are finally in.

Do you think Samsung can develop a Snapdragon-beating mobile chip?

Results

This was definitely a popular poll, accruing over 9,100 votes to date. The winning pick? Well, it turns out that almost 56% of respondents think Samsung can indeed develop a Snapdragon-beating mobile chip.

It wouldn’t be the first time Samsung beat Qualcomm. The Exynos 7420 was arguably the best chipset of 2015 while the rival Snapdragon 810 suffered from over-heating issues. Samsung also enjoys a partnership with AMD that could translate into superior graphical performance in the mobile space (although the AMD-powered Exynos 2200 wasn’t amazing). Toss in the recent news of an in-house development team, and it sounds like Samsung could deliver the goods down the line.

Otherwise, 44% of surveyed readers felt that Samsung couldn’t develop a Snapdragon-beating smartphone chip. This is perhaps reflected in the short term by the Galaxy S23 being exclusively powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 globally.

It’s also worth noting that Qualcomm has a potential ace up its sleeve with its upcoming Nuvia Oryon custom CPU technology, which it plans to use in lieu of Arm CPUs. Samsung is expected to stick with Arm CPU technology for now. So we could theoretically see a big CPU gap between Samsung and Qualcomm in the next couple of years.

Comments

• eszklar: I’ve always thought Samsung could design Exynos SoCs to be right up there with Snapdragon, but something was missing. Whether they need to bring in outside chip/engineering help, or simply buy an existing company that does design work. Apple has done this with the Ax series of mobile SoCs and the Mx series for tablets/desktops/laptops. Samsung is big enough to do this as well. They can compete with Apple for chip fab time.
• daftrok: Do I think they are CAPABLE of doing so? Yes. WILL they be able to within the next couple years? No.
• Beardednomad: The demise of Exynos has been talked about for months now. Samsung wasn’t happy with the peformance of those chips, there was even talks of them switching to Mediatek or partnering with them for their own chipsets (which this could very well be related to those rumors). Samsung LSI is reportedly ending Exynos alltogether and focusing on smart devices and iot going forward. That could end up being a disaster for Google as the Tensor is heavily Exynos based.
• Daniel Hollibaugh: I think that Samsung is perfectly capable of exceeding Qualcomm, they just need to get the best engineers, give them time to do their best work, and treat money like it doesn’t exist
• Mookie: They have the capabilities but no imagination.