Here’s a bit of a surprising news. Apparently Mediatek will start providing quad-core and octa-core chips for Samsung in the second half of 2014. according to the Chinese-language Commercial Times cited CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets as saying in an October 2 report.
MediaTek’s mobile chips have been adopted by mainly China-based branded smartphone vendors, such as the fast-growing Xiaomi, and a majority of white-box manufacturers.
Mediatek is dominating the chip market at the low-end and even mid-end, especially in China, but in other countries, too. Samsung hasn’t been shy about buying processors from other companies, seeing how they make a lot of products that sell many units, and it’s possible Samsung can’t handle all of the orders themselves.
That being said, I haven’t even seen Samsung at least try to cover their mid-end and low-end phones with their own chips. They barely even use their Exynos chips in their flagships, too. It’s strange, especially when they’ve been trying to imitate Apple for so long. I would expect them to want to copy this strategy of Apple, too, and make their own chips for at least most of their products, if not all.
This rumor says Mediatek will provide quad core and octo-core chips for Samsung in the second half of 2014, which most likely means they will wait until they can sell them 64-bit ARMv8-based quad core Cortex A53 chips for the low-end and mid-end (which will replace their current quad-core Cortex A7 chips), and octo-core big.Little chips with Cortex A53 and Cortex A57 CPU clusters.
It’s unclear yet whether this means Samsung will stop making Exynos chips based on Cortex A53 and Cortex A57, or if they will continue to make them, too, or if they will just make their own CPU cores in 2014, instead of licensing them from ARM.
Besides all of this, I’m sure Samsung will continue to acquire chips from Qualcomm, too, if nothing else for their cutting edge LTE modem integration for LTE markets, at least for the next couple of years until Samsung figures out that whole LTE integration thing. It all sounds like 2014 will be an interesting year for Samsung from the perspective of what chips they will be using.