According to sources from South Korea (Chinese), Samsung may be planning to build not just its own CPU core based on the ARMv8 architecture, but also its own GPU technology. We could see the new GPU, and possibly the new CPU as well, inside next year's Galaxy Note 5 device.
We've heard before that Samsung intends to overhaul its mobile devices business by rethinking the Galaxy S6 from the ground up and also by cutting the number of models it will introduce next year by 30 percent. It seems Samsung may be looking to overhaul its chip business as well, and at the same time reduce its reliance on third-party chips from Qualcomm or other companies.
Samsung is a large company that builds many of the components inside smartphones, such as RAM, flash memory and displays, but it still depends mostly on companies such as Qualcomm or ARM for the brains in its devices. Meanwhile, Samsung's biggest competitor, Apple, designs its own CPUs, which can be seen as a significant competitive advantage in some scenarios.
Samsung also makes a large volume of devices that it pushes to the market, which means that it could save significant amounts of money by using its own chips across its whole lineup of mobile devices. Having its own CPU and GPU technology could give its devices certain differentiating features as well, that other competing chips may not have.
Samsung has been manufacturing chips from other companies for a long time, but it doesn't have too much experience designing its own CPU or GPU, so it remains to be seen whether what the company releases in 2015 is going to be competitive with the latest technology from ARM, Qualcomm, Nvidia or Apple.
The company may need to acquire other chip design firms, and if it's serious enough about it, Samsung could even look at acquiring AMD, a struggling chip company that has both the necessary CPU and GPU expertise. AMD is also in need of a large cash infusion and access to a cutting edge process technology (such as Samsung's) in order to become more competitive with Intel. At the same time, Samsung could provide AMD a much-needed entry into the mobile market.
These are ideas Samsung may or may not consider at this point in time. First, the company will probably want to see how it can do on its own against incumbent CPU and GPU makers such as Qualcomm and Imagination, before such a major acquisition is even considered.
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