Sunday, January 4, 2026

Samsung's Retreat for Exynos: May Part Ways with ARM and AMD

Samsung's Retreat for Exynos: May Part Ways with ARM and AMD

Samsung is reportedly working on a significant strategy change for its future Exynos processors. According to the latest information, the company is considering moving towards entirely custom CPU and GPU designs with the Exynos 2800. This would mean shelving ARM cores and AMD RDNA-based graphics architecture.

The AMD Era in Exynos 2800 May End

According to the conveyed information, Samsung plans to return to its self-developed core and graphics architectures after a long hiatus. Accordingly, the Exynos 2800 may not use standard ARM CPU cores and could also mark the end of AMD RDNA-based Xclipse GPUs, which have been featured in Exynos flagships since 2022.

This approach is not entirely new for Samsung. Between 2016 and 2020, the company used custom CPU cores codenamed "Mongoose," developed by its Austin-based team. While these designs offered high peak performance on paper, they fell behind Snapdragon solutions due to issues with efficiency and thermal management. Consequently, Samsung ended this project and reverted to off-the-shelf ARM cores.

It is stated that this new endeavor is based on a different foundation. Samsung's upcoming 2 nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) manufacturing process could help overcome past efficiency problems. Furthermore, developing a custom GPU could offer Samsung greater control over AI workloads, image processing, and tighter system-wide optimizations.

According to the current roadmap, the Exynos 2800 is expected to debut in 2028 with the Galaxy S28 series. This grants Samsung several years of development time to mature the architecture. If this plan comes to fruition, it could be interpreted as Samsung wanting to provide a more direct response to Apple's end-to-end integrated silicon strategy.

0 Comments: