Samsung ready to fling Exynos at anyone who wants a phone chip With the threat of Qualcomm litigation receding, Samsung is in talks with ZTE, among others, and ready to license its Exynos phone chips to anyone who wants them. This could lower the costs of high-end mobiles. Reuters quotes former Qualcomm, now Samsung, executive Inyup Kang as saying that Samsung is talking to "all OEMs" …
I think you mean cease operating but seeing as Trump has already reversed the commerce departments decision…
Still the toing and froing in the Whitehouse is only going to increase the likelihood of non-US companies hedging their bets and looking for alternative suppliers and quite possibly even opting out of dollar-pricing.
It would make lowrange or midrange Exynos chips and aggressively promote them to the phone manufacturers. Price them competitively. Mediatek will be crushed. Samsung already has the production scale in-house.
And standardize all Samsung phones to have the Exynos chip; not Snapdragons in USA market and Exynos everywhere else. Nothing wrong with that: Huawei is doing the same with its own Kirin chips.
The problem is, the agreement that Samsung has with Qualcomm and of which they just extended earlier this year, they won't sell phones with the Exynos processor in North America. This dates back to 1993.
I much prefer the Exynos processor over the Qualcomm and would welcome seeing Exynos phones officially in North America.
I don't recall ever reading anything about such differences, the article mentions differences but doesn't say what they were and provides no links to articles.
In a search I see this:
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2018/01/31/qualcomm-and-samsung-amend-long-term-cross-license-agreement
Which I assume is what was implied but even that doesn't say anything other than they expanded their cross licensing stuff.
Might this have to do with Samsung using Qualcomm chips in the U.S. for what I had always assumed was for CDMA patents or whatever from Qualcomm(but obviously that is not Samsung specific)? Or was there something else? I have read people say the CDMA patents in question are going to expire soon as well(don't recall how soon).
All this time I was assuming Samsung had long made their chips available to anyone that wanted them.
I saw a link to an Anandtech review of the Samsung S9/S9+ phones earlier in the year and found it interesting their claim that the Exynos version of the phone had significantly worse battery life vs the Snapdragon.
It doesn't help ARM in that Softbank owns them. Companies usually do not like to buy or support competitors.
Add in that companies are trying to make as much profit as possible, not having to pay royalties say to ARM would allow more money to be kept. So far each new generation of ARM processors has an increased royalty fee with a wafer royalty fee now being added on. The royalty is 2% and above for the Cortex-A series CPU's; that is based upon the chip cost. If you use the Mali GPU, that is another 0.75 to 1.25%. That doesn't include the upfront fees either. So RISC-V would be enticing to quite a few companies.
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