Samsung’s AP chip Exynos turns from ugly duckling to golden swan

Samsung Electronics Co. has bittersweet memories of its Exynos chip – an in-house application processor (AP) referred to as the brain of mobile devices, including smartphones.

At its peak, back in the 2010s, the Samsung Exynos was often touted as the preferred alternative to Qualcomm Inc.’s mobile AP products.

Over the past few years, however, Exynos has been the thing to be avoided, with its quality seen as worse than rival chips designed by Taiwan’s up-and-coming MediaTek Inc.

The troublemaker, after coming under fire for overheating on Samsung’s Galaxy S22 smartphone in 2022, couldn’t make it to the follow-up model, Galaxy S23, in 2023.

Even within Samsung’s mobile division, talks went wild that it might be better to discontinue the development and advancement of the Exynos line of AP chips.

Samsung executives and industry officials now say that “the dog days are over.”

When the South Korean tech giant proudly unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S24, during the Galaxy Unpacked 2024 last week, it said the “AI smartphone,” packed with a variety of artificial intelligence features, is powered by the Exynos 2400 chip on non-Ultra models.

The highest model, the S24 Ultra, is equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor chipset, though.

A mobile AP is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed to support applications running in a mobile operating system environment.

Responsible for data processing in smartphones, the AP incorporates the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), and neural processing unit (NPU), making it a critical component influencing the performance of smartphones.

SPECTACULAR COMEBACK

Samsung said it has been receiving positive reviews from industry officials regarding the performance of the Exynos 2400 chip.

“Exynos AP’s performance gap with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has narrowed to less than 10%,” said an industry official.

Analysts said Samsung has improved the quality of its latest mobile AP chip through a new process, SF4P, designed for high-performance, low-power chips.

Samsung produces Exynos 2400 using its 4-nanometer third-generation foundry process technology.

With the 4 nm tech, Samsung said its product yield rate has risen to 60%, similar to that of foundry leader TSMC.

Another factor that contributed to the Exynos chip’s improved performance was its fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP), an integrated circuit packaging technology, and an enhancement of standard wafer-level packaging solutions, industry officials said.

Unlike conventional methods where a memory chip is connected to the circuit board via the substrate, FOWLP directly connects the memory semiconductor to the AP, making the mobile chip thinner and releasing the heat more easily.

“With the improved heat release in Exynos chips, the power efficiency of the Galaxy S24 has also improved,” said an industry official. “This will likely lead to higher Exynos orders from Chinese smartphone makers.”

Write to Jeong-Soo Hwang at hjs@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.