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posted by martyb on Monday November 04 2019, @10:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the further-development-would-cost-an-ARM-*and*-a-leg dept.

Samsung Confirms Custom CPU Development Cancellation

The fate of Samsung's custom CPU development efforts has been making the rounds of the rumour mill for almost a month, and now we finally have confirmation from Samsung that the company has stopped further development work on its custom Arm architecture CPU cores. This public confirmation comes via Samsung's HR department, which last week filled an obligatory notice letter with the Texas Workforce Commission, warning about upcoming layoffs of Samsung's Austin R&D Center CPU team and the impending termination of their custom CPU work.

The CPU project, said currently to be around 290 team members large, started off sometime in 2012 and has produced the custom ARMv8 CPU microarchitectures from the Exynos M1 in the Exynos 8890 up to the latest Exynos M5 in the upcoming Exynos 990.

Over the years, Samsung's custom CPU microarchitectures had a tough time in differentiating themselves from Arm's own Cortex designs, never being fully competitive in any one metric. The Exynos-M3 Meerkat cores employed in the Exynos 9810 (Galaxy S9), for example, ended up being more of a handicap to the SoC due to its poor energy efficiency. Even the CPU project itself had a rocky start, as originally the custom microarchitecture was meant to power Samsung's custom Arm server SoCs before the design efforts were redirected towards mobile use.

See also:
Samsung Is Shutting Down Its Custom CPU Core Department; Will License ARM's Performance Cores for Future SoCs
Samsung Might Still Design Semi-Custom Cores; AMD-based GPU Nearing Commercialization
Samsung sadly sings of memory, all alone in the moonlight, as downturn slashes profits by 56%


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 05 2019, @06:46PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday November 05 2019, @06:46PM (#916437) Journal

    Apple and Qualcomm seem to be making custom ARM work. Western Digital is pouring a lot of money into RISC-V (albeit not for performance cores).

    I like the patents explanation. Maybe Samsung just didn't have the ability to make something that much better than standard ARM cores without stepping into Qualc's line of fire. It also might have come down to their in-house fabrication technologies being worse than TSMC's (during certain years).

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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday November 06 2019, @12:19AM

    by driverless (4770) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @12:19AM (#916621)

    Both of those are somewhat special cases. Apple, another multibillion-dollar corporation, does everything it can in-house no matter what the cost, and the CPU with all of its Apple-specific custom features is pretty much the crown jewels of the iEverything ecosystem. Qualcomm, yet another multibillion-dollar corporation, makes its living by selling Arm-based chipsets to half the planet (and litigating against the other half), so making sure theirs are better is a requirement to stay profitable. WD in contrast makes hard drives. Their SweRV core may end up buried inside some product internally, but the fact that they're open-sourcing all their IP around it indicates they're not viewing it as terribly strategic.