Rumor: Samsung is working on its own CPU cores for smartphones and laptops

Samsung may be working on its own CPU cores for use in socs for smartphones, tablets and laptops. Insiders report this to Business Korea. The tech giant wants to become less dependent on Arm and compete better with Apple in the field of chip design.

If the development process is successful, Samsung could use socs with self-designed cores in its devices by 2027, an insider tells Business Korea. Samsung is expected to release its first next-gen chip for Galaxy smartphones in 2025, although it is still expected to be based on Arm’s core designs.

According to sources, the company recently assembled an internal team to develop the CPU cores. Samsung has reportedly hired Rahul Toley to lead this project. That developer previously worked at AMD on CPU architecture and design. Toley’s LinkedIn page confirms that he has been with Samsung Semiconductor since February as director of soc architecture.

Samsung previously worked on its own CPU cores for use in smartphones. The company worked on Mongoose in the early 2010s, a project for creating proprietary smartphone cores. They appeared in 2016 in Exynos-socs. However, those cores proved to be less efficient and offered lower multicore performance than competitor Qualcomm’s counterparts. Samsung officially scrapped Mongoose in 2019.

Samsung has been designing its own Exynos socs for smartphones for years, but currently uses off-the-shelf cores designed by Arm, just like Qualcomm. That’s in contrast to Apple, which completely designs the cores in its iPhone and Mac SOCs based on the Arm instruction set architecture. The South Korean tech giant wants to reduce its dependence on Arm’s core designs in the future and compete better with Apple. The company previously moved away from Arm GPUs in its smartphone chips, in favor of AMD’s RDNA architecture.

Business Korea does not report on the basis of which architecture Samsung wants to develop its own cores. Apple uses the Arm architecture for its own cores. Qualcomm has also been working on its own CPU cores based on the Arm-isa for some time. The company does this after it took over chip start-up Nuvia, although the chip designer is involved in a lawsuit with Arm about this.

From the old box: Samsung M1 design from 2016