Samsung Teases CES Announcement For Next Exynos SoC

Samsung this morning has dropped as brief teaser about their next-generation Exynos SoC. Dubbed “Exynos is back”, Samsung is revealing that there will be a proper announcement for the new SoC on January 12, which would fall on the first full day of CES.

Being that this is a teaser, any details are non-existent. But it’s worth noting that Samsung is promising “A whole new Exynos is coming”. Which hopefully is a sign that Samsung has spent the last couple of years hard at work on improving their future designs.

Although the most recent high-end Exynos designs (e.g. Exynos 990) have been decent, they’ve been overshadowed by rival Qualcomm’s designs – not to mention Apple’s own market-leading parts. The last few iterations of the chip have used Samsung’s own in-house CPU core design, which never worked out quite as well as Samsung was hoping for, both in overall performance and in keeping ahead of Arm’s own licensable designs.

Fittingly, Samsung has previously confirmed that they’ll be (back to) using Arm’s cores in future designs, particularly the the Cortex-X1, Arm’s big effort to double-down on overall CPU performance. So it’s pretty much guaranteed that Cortex-X1 will show up in Samsung’s next-gen SoC – especially if they want to compete with Qualcomm’s X1-equipped next-gen Snapdragon.

In any case, we’ll have more on the matter in a few weeks, when Samsung makes their announcement. So stay tuned.