Exynos chipsets rumored to feature Samsung GPUs in a couple of years

Samsung is quite capable of making its own processors, the biggest endorsement of this came from the company itself when it decided to use its own Exynos chipset in the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 edge as opposed to the Snapdragon 810. There have been rumors that in the future Samsung will also develop its own GPUs or graphics processor, according to a new rumored roadmap Samsung is going to start using its own GPUs with Exynos chipsets by 2017 or 2018.

However before the company does that it’s expected to employ Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) to its Exynos chipsets which will allow the CPU and GPU to be located on the same bus and let them share the same memory and tasks. In a nutshell this means that a handset with an HSA chip is going to provide improved overall performance and enhanced graphics performance. The rumored roadmap suggests that a Samsung Exynos SoC with HSA is going to arrive in a year or two with a Mali GPU and then by 2018 the GPU will be replaced by one Samsung has developed on its own in a newer Exynos chipset. So far Samsung has not confirmed anything regarding its plans to develop its own graphics processor so it would be best to take this with a pinch of salt for now.

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Verizon confirms Samsung Pay support

Samsung Pay was launched in the United States last month, the payments service requires carrier support to work and naturally it raised a few eyebrows when it was confirmed that Verizon will not be supporting the service at launch. This means that Verizon users are unable to use Samsung Pay on their carrier-branded devices, even though it’s the largest mobile carrier in the country, it was hinted recently that Verizon might confirm supporting the new service soon and now the company has sent out a tweet through its official account confirming just that.

Verizon has confirmed that it’s going to support Samsung Pay on compatible smartphones which include the Galaxy S6, the Galaxy S6 edge, the Galaxy S6 edge+ and the Galaxy Note 5. The carrier says that it’ll flip the switch on the service through a future software update but doesn’t say precisely when the software update will be released. At least Verizon users now know that their carrier will allow them to use Samsung’s new payment service at some point.

Samsung Pay will be supported on compatible Verizon smartphones (Galaxy S 6, S 6 edge, Note5, S6 edge +) through a future software update.

— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) October 6, 2015

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Samsung struggling to bring back once stellar smartphone profits

Even an year after tidying up its smartphone lineup and ditching plastic for metal in its high-end smartphones, Samsung seems to be struggling in bringing back its once stellar profits, which is clouding the company’s growth outlook. The world’s largest smartphone brand (by marketshare) is expected to showcase its first profit increase in two years, but the smartphone profits are expected to shrink on a sequential basis.

The company’s showed good efforts by launching new devices focussed for markets like India and continuously dropping the prices of its flagship devices, and that resulted into increased earnings. However, these steps have failed to be good enough in reigniting the growth in the smartphone business and regaining market share from Apple. The company is facing tremendous competition from Apple in the high-end and Chinese brands in the lower-end smartphone segment.

As competing with Apple on the basis of price is proving to be tough, the company is trying to lure consumers on the basis of design and features like Samsung Pay, which cannot be easily replicated by less technologically strong competitors. Samsung Pay, the company’s competitor to Apple Pay and Android Pay, has garnered a fair amount of interest. Samsung has even announced a seven-day tour to celebrate Samsung Pay’s launch in the US.

Even though brokerage firms are expecting Samsung to report a rise in its smartphone shipments, the mobile division’s operating profit is expected to fall to 7.7 percent due to greater sales of lower-end devices and price cuts for the Galaxy S6. On the other hand, the company’s semiconductor business will remain as its strongest performer and top earner for fifth straight quarter. The company not only makes storage and RAM chips, but also supplies SoCs for brands like Apple.

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Samsung’s flagship launches are something of a joke

Being a fan of the Galaxy Note lineup, I went out to buy the Galaxy Note 5 the day it launched in my country. I was sure I wanted the 64GB variant, but I was undecided between the black and silver color options. But unfortunately, I was made to choose between getting more storage or the color option I wanted – here in India, only the gold version of the Note 5 is available with 64GB storage, and the black version isn’t available at all. So I came away from the store with the silver variant, which looks great, but I had to settle for only 32GB of storage.

If you’ve been in the market for a Samsung flagship recently, you might have faced a similar situation where the model you wanted wasn’t easily available. The company has been rushing with device releases to fix falling sales and profits, as is evident from the early launch of the Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything about the fact that it continues to launch too many devices but doesn’t make sure they are all easily available from the start.

Compare this to Apple. Every time it launches a new iPhone, you can be sure that new iPhone will be available in every color and every storage option right from the get go. Okay, so you might see some of those variants selling out faster than others, but the Cupertino giant at least makes sure that it launches all the variants in the market at the same time. Of course, Apple has to do it since it makes all its profits primarily from the iPhone, but it’s something Samsung could learn from.

For a consumer that goes out to buy your device on the first day or in the initial days of launch, it’s simply unacceptable to not offer them all the options, especially when you consider that flagship smartphones are priced at their maximum in the first few months. Samsung has taken away expandable storage from its flagships, and though many are ready to forgive that move, shouldn’t the company be making sure it at least makes all the storage models accessible at the same time?

It probably makes business sense to not push a variant that might not see too many sales; after all, a 32GB Note 5 is bound to sell more because of a lower price than the 64GB model, so Samsung could save money by not manufacturing as many 64GB units. But for the consumer, it’s far from a sensible decision, and we can only hope the Korean manufacturer will think things through when it launches its next top-of-the-line Galaxy handset.

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Samsung’s Mongoose SoC benchmarks leak, shows incredible performance

As we reported earlier, Samsung is working on a new Exynos processor that has a new CPU architecture dubbed Mongoose (also called Exynos M1). Similar to Qualcomm and Apple, Samsung is developing custom CPU cores for better performance and efficiency. It could be the Exynos 8890 processor, but we are not too sure about the model number at this moment. New benchmarks of this SoC have just been leaked on the Internet, and they show that Samsung is continually improving the performance of the chipset.

As per an image that has been published on Weibo, the new Exynos processor with Mongoose cores is being tested at a frequency of 2.3GHz, and it has scored 2,294 points in the single-threaded test and 6,908 points in the multi-threaded test. When the processor was tested in Power Saving Mode, it scored 1,710 points in the single-threaded test and 4,896 points in the multi-threaded test. When set in Ultra Power Saving Mode, the Exynos chipset scored 1,100 points and 3,209 points in single-threaded and multi-threaded GeekBench tests respectively.

Chipset	Single-Core	Multi-Core
Samsung Exynos M1 Mongoose – 2.3GHz	2,294	6,908
Samsung Exynos M1 (Mongoose) – Power Saving	1,710	4,896
Samsung Exynos M1 (Mongoose) – Ultra Power Saving	1,100	3,209
Samsung Exynos 7420	1,486	4,970
Apple A9	2,487	4,330

Compared to the last time when its benchmark scores were leaked, the scores have improved, and the company continues to optimise the performance of this chipset. Apple’s A9 SoC, which is being regarded as one of the fastest mobile chips ever, scores 2,487 and 4,330 points in GeekBench’s single-threaded and multi-threaded tests. Compared to the processing chipset that is being used in the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus, Samsung’s upcoming Exynos processor has relatively similar performance, and we are sure that its performance will be even better by the time the first device equipped with the chipset launches in the market.

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