South Korea’s tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. is seeking to turn around the lag in its mobile system chip market with a new version that supports the latest smartphone network, industry watchers said Tuesday.
Samsung’s market share in application processors, which function as the “brains” of smartphones, was almost halved to 6.3 percent last year from 11 percent in 2012, data by market researcher Strategy Analytics showed.
U.S. Qualcomm Inc. took the highest share at 34.8 percent last year, trailed by MediaTek Inc. and Apple Inc. with 17.8 percent and 14.3 percent, respectively. Spreadtrum Communications Inc. held a comparable figure of 14.2 percent.
Samsung’s latest Exynos 5 Octa processors do not support the Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) service, the newest mobile network, prodding smartphone manufacturers to search for alternatives.
Even Samsung, the world’s No. 1 smartphone maker, adopted Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 processor in its latest lineups such as the Galaxy S4 LTE-A and the Galaxy Note 3 phablets instead of the Exynos.
According to market watchers, Samsung is expected to roll out “ModAP,” a cross between application processors and modem chips, which will support the LTE-A network. The new chip will also be equipped with the Wide Connection (Widcon) technology, which will directly connect application processors and dynamic random access memory to improve performance and energy efficiency.
Samsung may also launch a 64-bit processor this year, which will boast improved performance compared to existing 32-bit chips.
The development will allow smartphones to manage up to 4-gigabyte DRAM, they say.
Samsung’s most formidable rival Apple Inc.’s iPhone 5S, launched in September, features the 64-bit application processors, but it is equipped with a 1 GB DRAM, which limits the performance.
Samsung had announced in December that it has developed the industry’s first 8-gigabit memory chip using 20 nanometer technology with a speed of 3,200 megabits per second, dubbed the Low Power DDR4.
The company said that the new product has allowed it to establish a 4 GB DRAM by connecting four of the new chips, which is a technological advancement as the previous limit stood at 3 GB.
It was uncertain whether Samsung will apply new technologies in its next flagship model, presumably the Galaxy S5, slated to be launched between March and April, as they are yet to be mass-produced.
“Concerning Samsung’s technology maturity in developing chips, the new mobile application processor technologies may be used in the Galaxy Note 4 slated to be launched in the second half,” an industry source said. (Yonhap News)
