A new report claims that Samsung's LSI division, the team which designs the company's Exynos processors, isn't apparently feeling too good about the fact that the Galaxy S20 lineup is using a rival's chipset.
It definitely came as a surprise when it was announced that the Galaxy S20 series will carry with them Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 when Samsung already has its homegrown Exynos 990. According to Korean Economic Daily, the Exynos team reportedly felt "humiliated" over the tech giant's decision. The report also noted that Samsung's decision was the result of the Exynos 990's subpar performance compared to the Snapdragon 865.
Korean Galaxy S20s also have Qualcomm's processors. It was expected that Samsung's home country would support its own offerings, and yet Exynos chips were still ditched especially that 5G coverage started to roll out in the country.
South Korea is one of the first countries that adopted 5G networks, which uses more power than 4G devices. This led to Samsung's decision of using Snapdragon 865 since the next-gen coverage needed more robust battery life.
Clearly, Qualcomm's processors are far more efficient than Exynos chips, and that's enough reason to not use its own SoCs in its home market for the first time. However, Samsung won't stop making its Exynos devices, despite being regarded as inferior.
Samsung's LSI division shouldn't feel bad in any way since the company clearly has planned ahead where to place its Exynos processors. It's a challenge for the team though, to improve the power efficiency and performance of their products and make it at par or more superior to all the other Snapdragons.
Samsung is also encouraging other smartphone makers to use Exynos chips, by the way. So maybe we'll see a Vivo phone powered by the company's SoC one of these days.
In other Samsung news, it seems the Galaxy S20 flagship phones aren't fairing well in the market. According to a South Korean news blog, the Galaxy S20 series only sold 60% as much as the Galaxy S10 series in the same period in 2019. Samsung is expected to announce the official quarters by the end of this quarter, but if there's any truth to the report, the poor sales are the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which has all known industries across the globe.
While Samsung hasn't confirmed the information, the company still has something to thank for, as the Galaxy S20 Ultra proved to be a hit among fans. The Ultra is quickly becoming more popular than the standard S20 and S20+, making up more than half of all S20 series pre-orders.
