The Samsung Galaxy S23 series is off to a flying start for the Korean smartphone maker. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip is a major reason behind the lineup's success, as the SoC delivers exceptional performance and efficiency gains compared to last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Samsung has even gone all in on Qualcomm's chip across all markets, completely giving up on its in-house Exynos SoC. This comes a few years after the company shuttered its custom CPU design division inside Exynos and switched to reference Arm CPU cores. A new report now says that Samsung has restarted development on its custom CPU cores.

Business Korea makes the claim that Samsung's Electronics division has created an internal team led by Rahul Tuli to lead its custom CPU designing efforts. A recent hire, Tuli was previously a senior developer at AMD, working on various CPU development projects. Speculation suggests that in-house developed CPU could debut in 2027 at the earliest.

Besides this, the Korean company has supposedly beefed up efforts to develop its next-generation SoCs. Tentatively named the Galaxy chip, the team is working on a specifically optimized SoC for Galaxy devices, corroborating previous reports. Rumors suggest the first Galaxy chip could debut in 2025, although initially using Arm CPU cores. Until then, the company would presumably continue to use Snapdragon chips in its flagship devices, thanks to its multi-year partnership with Qualcomm.

Samsung previously used its in-house designed Mongoose CPU cores in Exynos SoCs. While powerful, the CPU was too power-hungry and inefficient compared to Qualcomm's offerings. It was a major reason why Samsung ultimately killed the CPU design team and laid off over 300 developers from its R&D facility in Austin, Texas.

While its own core might let Samsung better optimize SoCs for its devices, leading to superior performance and battery life, the company has already cast doubt on Business Korea's report, issuing the following statement:

"A recent media report that Samsung has established an internal team dedicated to CPU core development is not true. Contrary to the news, we have long had multiple internal teams responsible for CPU development and optimization, while constantly recruiting global talents from relevant fields."

That distinction may be a little hard to see, but it reads like Samsung attempting to clarify that its in-house silicon development efforts don't extend specifically to core design, and the company may stick to licensing there.

UPDATE: 2023/03/06 16:26 EST BY STEPHEN SCHENCK

Samsung response

This article has been updated to include Samsung's response to the report, as shared with SamMobile.