According to a new rumor from its home in South Korea, Samsung has assembled an internal team to work on developing its own custom CPU cores. These will initially be ARM-based and will be introduced in a Galaxy-branded chipset in 2025.
The more exciting part of the report implies that starting in 2027, Samsung will have developed its own CPU cores that does not use ARM design. These will reportedly appear in products manufactured by Samsung Electronics, such as high-end smartphones.
The logic here is of course to control as much of the product as possible, ‘vertical integration’ and all that. The weirdness comes from the fact that Samsung has actually tried this before, with a dedicated team in Austin, Texas.
It was called Project Mongoose, since a mongoose is a snake-eating mammal, and a krait is a kind of viper, as it turns out, and Qualcomm’s cores are branded Krait – nice little bit of trivia for you right there. And while the Mongoose cores performed well, they had problems with power efficiency and heat generation, which is why the entire project was killed in 2019.
You know how they say: if first it doesn’t work… Samsung seems keen to try again, despite its recent all-in collaboration with Qualcomm for the Galaxy S23 series. It seems that the company still feels that the use of its own CPU cores will bring great improvements to the optimization of its smartphones, whatever that means.
However, going ARM-less (ARM-free?) would be quite a big step, and so we’re more inclined to assume that the report may have misunderstood this fact. Samsung can still use heavily customized ARM designs, just like Qualcomm does, it doesn’t need to fully develop CPU cores on its own to successfully compete with Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Either way, it looks like the Galaxy S family exclusively using Qualcomm SoCs is one of those ‘enjoy it while it lasts’ situations that shouldn’t be taken for granted until the end of time.
