Samsung Electronics’ System LSI Division is in charge of designing and selling system semiconductors such as’Exynos’, a smartphone application processor (AP). In the mid-2010s, it was evaluated as “the AP technology is better than the US Qualcomm.” It wasn’t until 2019 that the steps began to twist. It was said that smartphones containing the Exynos chip would heat up quickly, and at the beginning of last year, I tasted the’humiliation’ that Samsung’s strategic smartphone Galaxy S20 could not be used in domestic models.
The System LSI Division has released a new product’Exynos 2100′ AP after having’washin consultation’ for over a year. There is an evaluation that it is a product developed under the’good luck’ of the division.
Produced in the latest 5nm process
Samsung Electronics officially released’Exynos 2100′ on the 12th and released detailed functions. The product is produced in the 5nm (nanometer, 1 billionth of a meter) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process at the Hwaseong plant in Gyeonggi Province. This process is the latest line of Samsung Electronics’ foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) division. The company explained that the 5nm chip has 25% less logic area (size) and more than 20% better power efficiency than the 7nm chip.
With design optimization, the performance of the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) that make up the AP improved by 30% and 40%, respectively. This means that the speed at which smartphones process data has increased that much, and high-definition videos can be viewed seamlessly. The Exynos 2100 also includes a neural network processing unit (NPU) that can perform 26 trillion times of artificial intelligence (AI) calculations per second.
Change the knife for a year and a half
The Exynos 2100 is evaluated as a product in which Samsung Electronics’ system semiconductor design and production capabilities are integrated. It is a card that will reverse the evaluation of some of the market that “Samsung Electronics’ AP business is in crisis.”
The System LSI Division is such a core business unit that the late Chairman Lee Kun-hee entrusted vice president Dae-je Jin, who was considered the best semiconductor talent at the time of Samsung, as the’business manager’ in 1997. In the early 2000s, it helped Apple in the US develop its own AP. In 2015, when Qualcomm’s’Snapdragon 810′ AP was engulfed in a fever controversy, many were evaluated as “Exynos is better.”
Strangely things didn’t go away from the second half of 2019. In September of that year, the world’s first fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication AP Exynos 980 was’released’, but the’mass production’ was later than the’Kirin 990 5G’ of Huawei’s subsidiary Hi Silicon. In October, the development team of the US subsidiary, which was in charge of developing its own CPU for Exynos AP, was disbanded.
There was also a bigger impact. In early 2020, Samsung Electronics’ wireless division excluded Exynos from the domestic Galaxy models. Inside, there was even a complaining that “Exynos’s role has become a lever for price negotiations with Qualcomm.”
Leading Samsung Electronics AP’Jungheung’
The System LSI Division has not been giving up after last year’s Galaxy Shock. Last year, it secured Chinese Vivo, the world’s fifth-largest smartphone company, as a customer, and delivered 5G APs such as’Exynos 980′ and’Exynos 1080′. By securing external customers, it was possible to increase the existing value and profitability of the system LSI division at the same time.
The Exynos 2100 is expected to enter Samsung Electronics’ premium smartphone Galaxy S21, which is scheduled to be released on the 14th. There is also a forecast that the global market share, which fell to 12% in the third quarter of last year, will rebound again.
In-yeop Kang, head of the system LSI division of Samsung Electronics (President, photo) said, “We are working with AMD in the US to improve GPU performance. I emphasized.
Reporter Hwang Jeong-soo [email protected]