Samsung could drop Exynos for Snapdragon-only flagships, and it's actually a good thing?

Source: Pocketnow video

Qualcomm has Snapdragon, MediaTek has Dimensity, Google has Tensor, and Samsung has Exynos — there are a number of smartphone chip makers in the market. Samsung's Exynos chipset series has been here for a long time, though one might argue they aren't the best. Even though Samsung's Exynos chips may have failed to impress consumers (and the whole tech community), the company's efforts towards improving its custom silicon haven't slowed down.

Last year, Samsung partnered with AMD to improve the graphics performance of its chipsets. It also became one of the first chipset makers to unveil a 4nm node architecture chip for smartphones, the Exynos 2200. The company also adopted the latest Arm Cortex-X2 core to improve the CPU throughput of the chipset.

Despite the efforts, the Exynos 2200 still failed to impress the users. Adam Conway of our sister website XDA Developers faced a number of issues with his Exynos 2200 variant of the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. But it appears that Samsung is still not giving up, as some of the information about the upcoming Exynos 2300 has leaked.

Exynos 2300 is reportedly under development

Source: Pocketnow

Now, a new report from GalaxyClub (via Sammobile) claims that Samsung is working on two next-generation Exynos chipsets. While details of the next-gen mid-range Exynos chipset (which will come with the model number S5E8535) are not known, the reliable tipster Roland Quandt has revealed some of the information about the upcoming flagship Exynos chipset.

The report claims that the Exynos 2300 will come with the model number S5E9935. For reference, the Exynos 2200 came with the model number S5E9925, so it's safe to say that the chipset with model number S5E9935 is the next-generation flagship Exynos chipset, which could be called Exynos 2300. The SoC is reportedly being called "Quadra" behind the scenes. While the specifications are unknown right now, Sammobile has highlighted some of the improvements the Exynos 2300 could come with.

While the industry is still adopting the 4nm node process architecture, the Exynos 2300 could use the 3nm GAA fabrication process. It is expected to come with the latest ARM Cortex CPU cores and an updated version of the Xclipse GPU. The improved version of the Xclipse GPU is said to be based on the newer version of AMD's Radeon GPU, which could bring a number of improvements.

Samsung could stick with Snapdragon for now

Source: Qualcomm

Even though the Exynos 2300 is expected to bring improvements in almost all areas, Samsung could launch its future flagship devices, Galaxy S23 for example, with Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets only. Despite improving the chipset on paper, the Exynos 2200 has failed to impress the users. Issues such as software lag, poor battery life, and overheating are still present.

The 'GOS' Galaxy S22 incident might have taught Samsung a lesson

Due to such issues, Samsung started to deliberately throttle apps on the Galaxy S22 series, following which a number of Samsung Galaxy S-series models were removed from the popular app Geekbench. The whole fiasco led to huge implications inside Samsung, so much so that people started to blame TM Roh for it.

Nonetheless, it seems that the whole GOS situation might have taught Samsung a lesson as the company is said to be working on a "real flagship chipset" for the 2025 Galaxy S-series smartphones. It is reported that Samsung has assembled a "dream team of 1,000 employees" to develop the new custom SoC from scratch. However, until then, Samsung is said to stick with Qualcomm as the flagship chipset provider.

Source: Pocketnow Video

It's a good thing

As much as we love the competition in the chipset space (it finally led Google to ditch Qualcomm and now we have the highly-optimized Tensor chipset), we still believe that it's best for Samsung to take a break. The company is said to be building the next chipset from scratch, which would give it time and space to rectify the mistakes it has made in the past few generations. Qualcomm, on the other hand, has been improving its chipsets in the past few years and could prove to be a smart choice for the time being.