Samsung returns to the "mainstream battlefield" of mobile phone processors, and the global AP industry "reshuffle" begins

Recently, Samsung released its latest 5nm mobile phone processor Exynos 1080 in Shanghai. Pan Xuebao, director of Samsung Semiconductor China Research Institute, said at the press conference that Exynos 1080 is a product designed specifically for the Chinese market. According to media reports, the processor may be first launched by vivo 60.

It is worth mentioning that in addition to vivo, which has maintained close cooperation with Samsung in recent years, Exynos1080 will also be supplied to domestic mobile phone manufacturers Xiaomi and OPPO in 2021. This is the first time since the interruption of cooperation between Meizu and Samsung that Samsung has once again supplied mobile phone chips on a large scale, squeezing into the mobile phone chip market where Qualcomm and MediaTek are competing for supremacy. Some industry insiders said that this is the market space given up by Kirin chips, which has caused a "reshuffle" in the global mobile phone chip market. Samsung has returned to the "mainstream" through this. And major mobile phone manufacturers have new options besides Qualcomm and MediaTek, which can be described as a win-win choice.

Exynos1080 has powerful performance

Exynos 1080 is the third 5nm mobile processor after Apple A14 and HiSilicon Kirin 9000. It is also the second 5nm SoC with integrated 5G baseband. It is the first mobile processor to adopt Arm's latest Cortex-A78 and Mali-G78 in CPU and GPU architecture. In addition to top performance, Exynos 1080 also has outstanding 5G and AI capabilities, and comprehensively improves imaging capabilities and e-sports gaming experience.

Recently, some media exposed the real running score information of the Samsung Exynos 1080. With a score of 690,000 points, it has become the highest-scoring processor platform in the world.

Prior to this, Samsung's mobile phone processors have always lagged behind the same generation products of its competitors. In the past five years, Samsung has been using its own architecture. However, compared with Qualcomm and Apple, chips based on Samsung's self-developed architecture have basically no competitiveness in terms of CPU performance and efficiency, two important indicators. Some foreign media once suspected that Samsung obtained impressive data performance through tricks in benchmark tests. In addition, Samsung's self-developed architecture chips can only be sold in markets outside the United States, China, and Japan, and the market sales space is relatively small. At the same time, the self-developed architecture is extremely expensive, the chip performance improvement is not obvious, and the return on capital is very small. Even the Exynos 990 launched last year is significantly behind Qualcomm and Huawei.

The launch of Exynos 1080 means that after several years of unsuccessful attempts, Samsung's mobile phone processors are finally on the same starting line as competitors such as Qualcomm.

Designed for the Chinese market

It is reported that Exynos 1080 is a product designed specifically for the Chinese market. Like Exynos 980 released in September last year, it will be first released by vivo. In recent years, Samsung and vivo have cooperated closely. Since the beginning of 2019, after the two parties reached an agreement on mobile processors, Samsung and vivo jointly released the 5G chip Exynos 980 in September 2019, which was first installed on the vivo X30 flagship phone. In May this year, Samsung launched a mid-to-low-end 5G mobile phone chip Exynos 880, which was installed on the vivo Y series of mobile phones.

Unlike before, Exynos 1080 is expected to further expand its user base. In addition to vivo, OPPO and Xiaomi are also likely to be equipped with this chip. As early as the beginning of this month, South Korea's authoritative media BusinessKorea reported that Samsung's System LSI Business Department stated that it will supply its Exynos series processors (APs) for smartphones to Chinese smartphone manufacturers Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo in 2021.

Before Samsung and vivo cooperated, the last time Samsung mobile phone processors appeared in the Chinese market on a large scale was the cooperation between Samsung and Meizu. In 2008, Meizu M8 was officially released with Samsung S3C6410 processor, the same processor as iPhone 3G. Since then, Meizu mobile phones have basically followed the pace of Samsung Orion processors. In 2018, Meizu 16 equipped with Qualcomm 845 processor was officially released, and at the same time, it was announced that Meizu and Samsung’s ten-year cooperation had ended.

Samsung's ambition in this field is obvious as it was the first to launch 5nm flagship mobile phone processors before Qualcomm and expand its supply range.

Samsung's return to the main battlefield of mobile phone processors is related to the business opportunities brought by 5G commercial use. In the 5G SEP (standard essential patent) list released by international patent data company IPlytics in February this year, Samsung ranked second with 2,795 patent applications, second only to Huawei. At the same time, Samsung has gained unexpected market space against the backdrop of Sino-US trade frictions.

As early as March this year, the Boston Consulting Group predicted in an assessment report on the impact of Sino-US trade frictions on the US semiconductor industry that in the short term, South Korea may replace the United States and become the global semiconductor leader with its strong supply and expansion capabilities in key components such as memory, displays, imaging and mobile processors.

Under the complex international situation, Samsung is also striving to seize the market space left by Kirin chips and become a third party that benefits from this round of Sino-US trade friction. According to Yonhap News Agency, Samsung's R&D expenditure in the first nine months of this year reached a record 15.89 trillion won, a year-on-year increase of 52%.