After much excitement was created after Samsung announced their return to using bog standard designs from ARM rather than a custom core architecture there was also the rumour that the next Samsung device next year (rumoured to be the Samsung Galaxy S21) will be shipping with it along with an AMD GPU. Unfortunately it appears, based on information from a source with a good reputation for reliability that although it will be using a bog standard ARM CPU design it will be staying with the Mali GPU rather than making the switch.

One thing to keep in mind that although it will be using bog standard ARM designs it is also important to realise that they can be customised – for example when it comes to the Mali G78 it is possible to choose from between 7-24 cores, from 512KB to 2MB of L2 cache etc. not to mention the customisations that I’m sure can be done at the processor level. As long as the performance is ‘close enough’ to what Qualcomm offer then the only people who will quibble over a matter of a few points on synthetic benchmarks are those in the press and in online forums all while the average person will happily rock up and buy a Samsung device.

There is also a rumour that with US carriers phasing out their CDMA2000 networks and the rise of nationwide LTE support (including VoLTE support) that Samsung may look at dropping Qualcomm. This is particularly interesting given that there are handset vendors deciding to go with the Qualcomm 765G SoC as a success to the Qualcomm 865 SoC, Samsung using its own modem and SoC could mean that Samsung decides to standardise on their own SoC worldwide which would either allow them to bank higher margins, pass on the savings yet still maintain better profit margins that if they kept with Qualcomm. If the sales in the UK of the Exynos based Note 20 is anything to go by, Samsung not using Qualcomm outside of the US hasn’t hurt their sales so it would make sense – to make that leap and standardise on a single hardware platform in much the same way that Apple has done with it’s iPhone when stopped sourcing modems from two suppliers and decided to go ‘all in’ with Intel modems.