We have already covered the news about Exynos developing new mid-range chips here. After successfully placing the Exynos 9611 in virtually every mid-range phone of theirs, they are developing the 9630 now.
And now out of the blue, we have come to learn that Google is showing interest in Exynos too. As rumors have suggested that Google is moving away from Qualcomm and looked for other manufacturers. As a result, they might have ended up with Samsung.
Despite their poor show with the Exynos 990 they still have some leg to stand on. Google has requested Samsung to develop a custom chipset. This custom chip consists of two Cortex-A78 cores, two A77 cores, and four A55 cores. It will also feature a Mali MP20 GPU that will be base on a brand new architecture called Borr. It should be noted that both the Cortex-A78 and the Borr components are yet to be officially announced.
Considering the Cortex-A77 cores were already powerful, to begin with, so the new A78 cores must be even more powerful. This may not bode well for smartphone hardware so maybe we might be looking at other mobile gadgets that are powered by these chips. Google has heavily invested in the Chromebook ecosystem.
Exynos for Multiple Mobile Applications?
And recently we are beginning to see some great Always-connected laptops. So maybe this is a ploy to spec up their Chromebooks as they directly compete with those windows powered laptops. Samsung will reportedly use the 5nm EUV node for fabricating these chips which may alleviate some of their heating problems but we don’t know for sure.
Another interesting thing to note is that these custom chips will feature Google’s own Visual Core ISP and NPUs instead of Samsung’s in-house offerings. This might mean that server applications may also be on the table. But we have seen these two work in tandem with Pixel phones before for transcription videos offline, AI-enhanced filters and bokeh.We may even potentially see VR and AR applications as Facebook-owned Oculus is also hunting for chip manufacturers for their future devices.