back to article 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" …

  1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    This is bound to get interesting

    How fresh is this information?

    I thought ZTE intended to seize operating which in turn forces its majority owner (the Chinese state) to step into the dispute.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: This is bound to get interesting

      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.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If Samsung is smart....

    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.

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: If Samsung is smart....

      I'm not sure that's a good idea, with the current American government's paranoia .

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If Samsung is smart....

        South Korea and America are tight bros. No reason for paranoia.

        1. Cuddles

          Re: If Samsung is smart....

          "No reason for paranoia."

          The whole point of paranoia is that reason has nothing to do with it.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If Samsung is smart....

      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.

  3. Nate Amsden

    What differences did Samsung and Qualcomm have?

    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.

  4. Dan 55 Silver badge

    It seems to be one Trump tweet away from death these days.

    Aren't we all?

  5. Nimby
    Joke

    Could always switch to Intel Atom*

    Because that went well...

    (*= Yes, I am aware that Intel no longer manufactures Atom for phones. However, Spreadtrum does. So, theoretically, it could ´still be a thing.)

    1. Waseem Alkurdi

      Re: Could always switch to Intel Atom*

      ... or a MIPS chip. #whynot

  6. Paul

    given that RiscV is coming along nicely, I would have thought that all the companies who paid Arm a fortune to licence their designs will be wanting to get as many design wins as possible in order to recoup their investment before RiscV renders it moot.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      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.

  7. Paul

    Lenovo or ZUK phones with exynos?

    There have been lots of stories and rumours that Lenovo, or their sub-brand Zuk, would produce a phone with an Exynos chip inside, but I couldn't find evidence of any going into production and mass market.

    Does anyone know of one?

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