Samsung Confirms Custom CPU Development Cancellation
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 4, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- CPUs
- Smartphones
- Exynos
- SoCs
- Samsung LSI
The fate of Samsung's custom CPU development efforts has been making the rounds of the rumour mill for almost a month, and now we finally have confirmation from Samsung that the company has stopped further development work on its custom Arm architecture CPU cores. This public confirmation comes via Samsung’s HR department, which last week filled an obligatory notice letter with the Texas Workforce Commission, warning about upcoming layoffs of Samsung’s Austin R&D Center CPU team and the impending termination of their custom CPU work.
The CPU project, said currently to be around 290 team members large, started off sometime in 2012 and has produced the custom ARMv8 CPU microarchitectures from the Exynos M1 in the Exynos 8890 up to the latest Exynos M5 in the upcoming Exynos 990.
Over the years, Samsung’s custom CPU microarchitectures had a tough time in differentiating themselves from Arm’s own Cortex designs, never being fully competitive in any one metric. The Exynos-M3 Meerkat cores employed in the Exynos 9810 (Galaxy S9), for example, ended up being more of a handicap to the SoC due to its poor energy efficiency. Even the CPU project itself had a rocky start, as originally the custom microarchitecture was meant to power Samsung’s custom Arm server SoCs before the design efforts were redirected towards mobile use.
In a response to Android Authority, Samsung confirmed the choice was based on business and competitive merits. A few years ago, Samsung had told us that custom CPU development was significantly more expensive than licensing Arm’s CPU IP. Indeed, it’s a very large investment to make in the face of having the up-hill battle of not only to designing a core matching Arm’s IP, but actually beating them.
Beyond the custom CPU’s competitiveness, the cancellation likely is tied to both Samsung’s and Arm’s future CPU roadmaps and timing. Following Deimos (Cortex-A77) and Hercules (Cortex-A78?), Arm is developing a new high-performance CPU on the new ARMv9 architecture, and we expect a major new v9 little core to also accompany the Matterhorn design. It’s likely that Samsung would have had to significantly ramp up R&D to be able to intercept Arm's ambitious design, if even possible at all given the area, performance, and efficiency gaps.
In practice, the end result is bittersweet. On one hand, the switch back to Cortex-A CPUs in future Exynos flagship SoCs should definitely benefit SLSI’s offerings, hopefully helping the division finally achieve SoC design wins beyond Samsung’s own Mobile division – or dare I hope, even fully winning a Samsung Galaxy design instead of only being a second-source alongside Qualcomm.
On the other hand, it means there’s one less custom CPU development team in the industry which is unfortunate. The Exynos 990 with the M5 cores will be the last we’ll see of Samsung’s custom CPU cores in the near future, as we won't be seeing the in-development M6. M6 was an SMT microarchitecture, which frankly quite perplexed me as a mobile targeted CPU – I definitely would have wanted to see how that would have played out, just from an academic standpoint.
The SARC and ACL activities in Austin and San Jose will continue as Samsung’s SoC, AI, and custom GPU teams are still active, the latter project which seems to be continuing alongside the new AMD GPU collaboration and IP licensing for future Exynos SoCs.
Related Content:
- Samsung Announces Exynos 990: 7nm EUV, M5, G77, LPDDR5 Flagship SoC alongside Exynos 5123 5G Modem
- AMD and Samsung's GPU Licensing Deal: A New Era of Collaboration?
- The Samsung Galaxy S10+ Snapdragon & Exynos Review: Almost Perfect, Yet So Flawed
- Hot Chips 2018: Samsung’s Exynos-M3 CPU Architecture Deep Dive
- The Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ Review: Exynos and Snapdragon at 960fps
- Hot Chips 2016: Exynos M1 Architecture Disclosed
Source: KXAN
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Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
They'll likely be spread around AMD, Intel, Arm, Apple, IBM as they're all in Austin.Death666Angel - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
It's a sad state. Someone like Samsung could afford to go Apple, but they didn't manage due to whatever issues they had. I liked the Cortex based designs (Galaxy S2 user here) and ARM has really knocked it out of the park swith A76 and hopefully onward.webdoctors - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
That's the really surprising thing. If ANYONE could go with custom CPU it should be Samsung since they could feed all their internal divisions from TV to cellphone to laptop. Bizarre turnaround. I wonder if its political or something.melgross - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
They probably just couldn’t do what they wanted to. They never had a big SoC business for third parties, mostly foundry work. When Apple left, according to reports, that was over 40% of their SoC production, and the top end of it too.vladx - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Apple only used SoCs from Samsung until iPhone 4 afaikmelgross - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Yes, SoCs that performed about the same as everyone else’s. Back then, no ARM SoC performed well, and battery life wasn’t so good either. That’s why Apple decided to go their own way. And back then Apple and Samsung were friendlier. But Apple decided that Samsung could no longer provide what they needed for their ambitious future needs. Nobody could. They could have gone to Qualcomm.They did the right thing though and made their own.
Kvaern1 - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Apple used Samsung as a 2nd foundry as late as the A9 but the chips Samsung produced wasn't on par with TSMC'sdropme - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
It's an interesting move considering Arm is now actively selling its own chips.melgross - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Which chips are those?eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
This closing was logical from a business POV, but is bad news for the mobile space: it's now ARM vs. Apple, and that leaves all non-Apple/iOS phones with just one vendor that truly develops new cores - ARM. Now, I believe they're doing quite well in keeping the pace up, but competition tends to keep market leaders on their toes. Best example was Intel in the desktop and server space. Pretty stagnant for several years, then, once AMD finally launched Zen, Chipzilla got a move on.