Last week at CES, Huawei introduced a 6.1-inch device. Now that’s a big phone right? Well you know Samsung couldn’t let that Chinese manufacturer to out do them in the phablet market in which they made popular. We already heard before CES that Samsung was making a 6.3-inch Galaxy Note 3 for later this year. But also, Samsung is planning on putting their new Exynos 5 Octa chip which was also announced at CES last week in the device. Not to much of a surprise though. The Exynos 5 Octa is built on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, so ideally it should outperform the Tegra 4 which was also announced at CES last week. The Exynos 5 Octa will have four high performing cores and four low-consumption cores which should achieve the best of both worlds and give out some great battery life. I’d expect to see this one in both the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note 3 as well as some other phones from Samsung and other manufacturers later this year.
Samsung’s chip making division is trying to lower their reliance on Apple’s orders. Apple has been rumored, countless times, to be moving away from Samsung as one of their major suppliers of mobile device parts. And because of that, Samsung wants to be sure that they have customers that can step in and ensure that the Korean manufacturers sales stay right where they are.
Samsung’s top executives including Samsung Electronics CEO Kwon Oh-hyun held meetings with various Chinese manufacturers to which they want to sell more mobile processors too. These meetings happened last week in Las Vegas at CES. No surprise there. An official from Huawei confirmed that they were approached by Samsung, and said that Huawei has nothing against working with Samsung if the Koreans offer “favorable conditions”. A ZTE official stated that his company needs “better chips with better pricing”. Which could indicate that ZTE is willing to do business with Samsung.
While Huawei and ZTE are the big manufacturers in China, there are still a few other companies that are up-and-coming and looking to make it big. These could also become Samsung customers in the near future which include Yulong Coolpad and TCL. Currently Apple makes up nearly 80% of Samsung’s chip division’s revenue. That is said to drop significantly over the next few years. Which is why it makes sense that Samsung is seeking new customers for their mobile processors.