In its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Note 20, Samsung has installed the Exynos 990 processor, which is also used in the Galaxy S20 series launched earlier this year. Some experts predicted that Samsung would use the improved Exynos 992 chip in the Galaxy Note 20, but the company decided not to upgrade the processor. At the same time, for the Korean, American, Canadian, Japanese and Chinese markets, a version of the Galaxy Note 20 was released based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ against the Snapdragon 865 used in the Galaxy S20. Therefore, there is a feeling that Samsung is not very keen on competing with Qualcomm, but, on the contrary, is cooperating with its potential competitor.

However, according to the source, Samsung is going to hit Qualcomm in 2021 and is actively working on the creation of a significantly improved Exynos chip. The Korean manufacturer is working closely with ARM to develop a new core called Cortex-X Custom. Previously, Samsung only bought licenses for ready-made cores and instruction sets from ARM, but now it has significantly expanded its cooperation with the developer in the field of joint chip design. The Cortex-X core is said to provide 30% better performance over existing Cortex-A cores.

In addition, Samsung Electronics plans to overcome Exynos’ biggest drawback – weak graphics – by partnering with AMD and moving its chips to RDNA graphics architecture.

Finally, Samsung plans to outperform Qualcomm by significantly upgrading the microprocessors (NPUs) and modems used in Exynos. The company plans to increase the number of specialists working on NPU by 10 times by 2030 – up to 2000 people.