Heterogeneity in any industry is important - Samsung's decision to close its custom CPU research division is sad

Number of silicon fab operators is reducing. A lot. Mobile operating systems have narrowed down to Android and iOS [excellent OSes such as the BlackBerry 10 and Windows 10 Mobile have also died]. LCD/OLED panel manufacturers have reduced in number. Mobile CPU designers have reduced in number as well. FB is practically the only social networking website. ISAs such as SPARC and Power are dying, in favor of industry consolidation towards x86 and ARM. And so on. Of course, network effect has a role to play here.

In light of this, it's sad that Samsung is closing down development of its custom CPUs - probably referring to the 'M' series of its flagship cores within Exynos [such as Mongoose]. Not only does the scenario become less exciting - with everyone referring to the same boring A76, A77, A55, etc. - this closure also reduces the heterogeneity in the market. Kind of sad.

Of course, re-allocation of the same/existing set of resources towards higher priorities / higher returns isn't bad usually. For example, if Samsung is thinking of laying off these 300 chip engineers and instead hiring 300 engineers for some kind of future RISC-V chips, that could overall be a better thing for Samsung. Or perhaps hiring 300 engineers for Samsung's currently-crude Cloud services, to better compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

There's another thing to think about. Suppose Samsung's custom CPU core efforts cost it X million USD per year on an ongoing basis currently, and licensing CPU cores directly from ARM is going to cost Y million USD per year, where Y << X, then it doesn't make sense to spend a higher amount of money.

"A few years ago, Samsung had told us that custom CPU development was significantly more expensive than licensing Arm’s CPU IP."

"On the other hand, it means there’s one less custom CPU development team in the industry which is unfortunate."

TAGS= Heterogeneous; Industrial base; Multiple suppliers