Will the Galaxy S23 series mark an end to Exynos? Samsung’s Texas-sized answer is ‘no’
Discerning Galaxy and Pixel phone owners haven’t been pleased with the performance of Samsung’s Exynos SoC.So hasn’t Samsung. Every generation, some achievement gap getsbenchmarked onto the public recordand the people who care (including those who notice above-average degradation over the long term) might steer their savings towards another phone brand, perhaps one with silicon fabricated by rival TSMC — basicallythesource for mobile APs at the moment. But despite regular failures and a number of recent strategic retreats on this front, Samsung remains committed to a $17 billion multi-year bet it can do better with a new factory in the United States.
$200 billion in Texas?
Taylor, Texas, a town of about 16,000 people that’s a 45-minute drive from the state capital of Austin, is busy growing. It owes a lot of that growth to Samsung, where the company has sited its new 1,200-acre chip plant. In the past month, Williamson County relinquished a portion of County Road 404 to Samsung for the company to own and maintain as well as creating a new alignment calledSamsung Highway.
While the county and TxDOT work on widening nearby roads with a little help from Samsung’s money, theAustin Business Journalreports (viaKorea JoongAng Daily) that the tech behemoth has been granted $4.8 billion in tax breaks on its new factory by the Taylor Independent School District, which handle property tax issues.
The company proposed back in July that it would spend up to $200 billion (which includes the initial plant investment) to build out 11 plants in the area. Tax relief decisions have yet to be announced on the other plants and plans are fungible for these long-term construction projects.
Samsung expectsto have the first foundry open by late 2024 and staffed with more than 2,000 workers focused on producing processors for 5G, AI, and high-performance computing — a lot of purposes that fit the Exynos division like a glove. Viable products could make it into retail items as soon as a couple years after the ribbon cutting. Meanwhile, TSMC is spending $40 billion on a second chip facility in Arizona which it hopes to open around the same time (viaTelecoms.com).
The end of Exynos?
All of this big-picture stuff is interesting, but you might be more interested in the speculative minutia of what will run inside Galaxy S23 series devices where. Historically, some markets got S-series phones with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips while other got Samsung’s own Exynos chips. You know,the “meh” ones. The breadcrumb trail this year has led us to believe thateveryone in the world will be getting Snapdragon chips— and not just Snapdragon chips, but special, supercharged “Snapdragon for Galaxy” chips. For Exynos, this wouldn’t just be a ceding of home ground, but of its native association with top-of-the-line hardware.
Samsung and Qualcomm have fostered a strong working relationship with the formerproducing a share of Snapdragon SoCsfor the longest time.They’re also locked into an agreementthrough 2030 which allows the two to share patents and opens up the opportunity to expand Snapdragon’s presence on Galaxy phones. With Samsung acknowledging to investors that it’s been on its back foot in semiconductors, these developments have led some observers to wonder whether Samsung is actually thinking all the way into the future with Exynos.
It’s important to keep in mind that Samsung is still involved incrafting Google’s Tensor SoCsfor Pixel devices and that you’ll find Exynos on a great number of Galaxy-brand mid-range and budget phones. That said, those low-end devices have seena slump in salesover the past year heading into a period of deepening global economic uncertainty. Plus, we wouldn’t count Google as too loyal of a client if it can generate or acquire a way to make its own chips — it reportedly tried to do so witha bid for Nuvia, now with Qualcomm.
Timing and execution is everything
Present pressures have driven tech companies, the 21st-century pillars of said global economy, to make drastic moves that have either shifted or concentrated on their future visions. For thousands of people, these moves have meantlayoffsin the past few months. For the industry, it’s meant many niche and mission-driven operations have had to close up shop.
While Samsung’s largess in all aspects — including its executive class — can make talk seem small, there is some reason to believe that Samsung is willing to stick it out for Exynos over the next several years and make sure its chips can outdo the competition. Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Han Jong-hee essentially gave his rank and filethe green lightto go overboard and not worry about “getting caught up in cost reduction” this year.
If that means taking an internal ‘L’ to make sure Galaxy flagships sell better than iPhones, they may as well hitch with Qualcomm for the Galaxy S23. Anything to keep the pride alive until that new factory in Taylor comes online and gets hot.
Of course, the actual bet at the end of 2024 is to see if a fresh plant with new equipment can give Exynos the performative boost it needs to make chips at least as good as TSMC’s.
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